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THE KING OF LOVE 









Eugene Burnand 


THE GOOD SHEPHERD 






The King of Love 

Meditations on The Twenty-Third Psalm 


By 

J. D. JONES , D. D. 

»^ 

Minister , Richmond Hill Congregational Churchy 
Bournemouth , England 

Author of “The Birthday of Hope , ” “The Hope of the 
Gospel“The Lord of Life and Death , ” etc ., r/r. 



> ) ) 


New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 








Copyright, 1922, by 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 




• © * 

*.• 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 

DEC 30 '22 

©C1AG92634 

•A' I 


QtOS 


Contents 


ro 

I. The Shepherd Psaem . 

The Shepherd. 

The Author of the Psalm. 
God—the Shepherd. 

Man’s Freedom from Care. 

II. The Shepherd's Leading 
God’s Nourishment. 

God’s Kindness. 

What Are Green Pastures ? 
The Still Waters. 

III. Restoration and Guidance . 

God the Restorer. 

The Convenient Food. 

Paths of Righteousness. 

IV. The VaeeEy . 

For His Name’s Sake. 

The Valley of Gloom. 

The Keeping Presence. 

[7] 


11 


35 


61 


. 87 


CONTENTS 


V. The Flux Table . 

Our Enemies. 

The Prepared Table. 

VI. Goodness and Mercy 
The Rear Guard. 

The House of the Lord. 


/ 


. Ill 


. 135 


[8] 




I 

THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


The King of Love my Shepherd is, 
Whose goodness faileth never; 

I nothing lack if I am His 
And He is mine for ever. 

Where streams of living water flow 
My ransomed soul He leadeth, 

And, where the verdant pastures grow, 
With food celestial feedeth. 

Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, 

But yet in love He sought me, 

And on His shoulder gently laid, 

And home, rejoicing, brought me. 

In death’s dark vale I fear no ill 
With thee, dear Lord, beside me; 

Thy rod and staff they comfort still, 
Thy cross before to guide me. 

Thou spread’st a table in my sight; 
Thy unction grace bestoweth, 

And O what transport of delight 
From Thy pure chalice floweth. 

And so through all the length of days 
Thy goodness faileth never: 

Good Shepherd, may I sing Thy praise 
Within Thy house for ever. 

—Sir H. W. Baker. 


I 


THE SHEPHERD PSALM 

t 

THE SHEPHERD 

F OR many and various reasons a preacher 
rather shrinks from making this short 
but most exquisite of Psalms his theme. 
To begin with, there is the familiarity of the 
Psalm itself. It is easier far to speak or write 
upon an unfamiliar passage than upon one 
whose every word by constant and repeated 
usage has become familiar and dear. And 
more familiar verses than those of this Psalm 
the Bible does not contain. People have medi¬ 
tated so often and so deeply upon the words of 
this Psalm, and so much has been said and 
written about it that one is naturally inclined 
to think that everything that can be profitably 
said about it has already been said, that all the 
truth it contains has been discovered, that its 
very last drop of sweetness has been extracted, 

[11] 


THE KING OP LOVE 


and that therefore any preacher or writer who 
should venture to make the verses of this Psalm 
his theme would be but repeating a thrice-told 
tale. 

Further, this little Psalm is not only the most 
familiar of the Psalms, it is also the most sa¬ 
cred and dear. It comes to us burdened with 
all sorts of hallowed associations. In its words 
men and women all down the centuries have 
given expression to their faith and hope. It is 
the Psalm with whose words they have sus¬ 
tained themselves in life’s great hours. 

This is the Psalm which Augustine calls the 
“ martyr’s Psalm,” because it was with its 
words upon their lips that the Christians of the 
early days faced the lions and the sword and 
the fire. This was the Psalm with which 
Luther comforted his soul in a time of sore 
sickness. This was the Psalm which Isabel 
Alison and Marion Howie sang as they were 
taken to the scaffold at Edinburgh. “ Come, 
Isabel,” said Marion Howie—and she was but 
twenty years of age—“ let us sing the Twenty- 

r i2i 




THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


third Psalm ”—and so together they went down 
into the valley singing in the glad assurance 
that God was with them. It was with this 
Psalm on their lips or in their ears that men as 
different as Archbishop Laud, Edward Irving 
—that great but erratic religious genius—and 
Dr. Duff, the great Indian missionary, faced 
their end. And for most of us it has not 
historical associations simply, but personal as¬ 
sociations, too. This is a Psalm which was 
specially dear to our own loved and lost. This 
is the Psalm with whose great declaration of 
the Shepherd’s love and care they comforted 
themselves as they drew near to the valley. 
This is the Psalm which has brought balm and 
healing to our own hearts as we have been 
gathered round the open grave. Now it seems 
almost an irreverent thing to examine and ana¬ 
lyze, to discuss and criticize a Psalm that occu¬ 
pies so unique a place in the affections of men 
as this Psalm does. It is like criticizing your 
mother’s face. The fitting thing seems to be 
to let the Psalm do its own work, and make its 

[13] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


own impression, and convey its own spirit of 
quiet and happy trust to the heart. 

And then there is always the risk of marring 
the perfect beauty of the Psalm by careless 
handling. The exquisite bloom of the flower is 
soon spoiled if you begin to handle it. I sup¬ 
pose the work of the botanist is useful and 
necessary; I suppose it is just as well we should 
know all about the structure of the flowers— 
but oftentimes as the botanist examines the 
structure of the flower its beauty gets disfig¬ 
ured, if not totally destroyed. And the 
preacher who weighs and examines every word 
is much like the botanist. He may destroy the 
beauty of a Psalm like this—rob it of its bloom 
—in the very effort to explain it. He may 
make people wish that he would leave them 
alone to enjoy the beauty of the flower, instead 
of insisting upon dissecting it. And the fear 
of doing that is enough to make any one shrink. 
Better let the flower bloom there in its own 
native and unmistakable beauty than run the 
risk of spoiling it by rough handling. All 

[14] 




THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


these considerations have had their weight with 
me. Nevertheless, I am going to venture to 
speak about these familiar verses—with the 
hope in me that I may be kept from saying 
anything that shall mar their beauty, but that 
God will use me to bring out of them things 
new as well as things old for the profit of you 
who read. I am going to study these sacred 
verses in the hope that as we look steadily into 
them we may discover depths of tenderness in 
them which shall make them more sacred still. 
I am going to speak about this exquisitely 
beautiful little Psalm in the hope and with the 
prayer that as the result of patient examination 
it may shine for us with a beauty more tran¬ 
scendent yet. 

THE AUTHOR OP THE PSAEM 

This first study shall be mainly by way of 
introduction. To begin with, I want to say a 
word or two about the authorship of the Psalm. 
It is in the minds of ordinary Christian people 
inseparably associated with the name of David. 

[ 15 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


That is what the title calls it: “A Psalm of 
David.” It is only fair, however, to say that 
the titles of the Psalms, while undoubtedly 
ancient, were added later than the date of the 
Psalms themselves and are therefore not abso¬ 
lutely sure and reliable evidences of authorship. 
They tell us who were traditionally supposed to 
be the authors of the Psalms in question. But 
their witness is by no means unimpeachable. 
There are numbers of Psalms whose titles are 
quite obviously wrong. The statement of the 
title is refuted oftentimes by the contents of the 
Psalm. The critics have been, as you know, 
busy with the book of Psalms, as they have 
been with the other books of the Old Testa¬ 
ment, and as a result of their investigations 
they have been led to assign to other hands and 
to a much later date many of the Psalms which 
by their titles are attributed to David. With 
many of their judgments honest students are 
simply bound to agree. We may not like to 
have our traditional ideas upset, and it goes 
against the grain perhaps to have to assign to 

[ 16 ] 




THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


some unknown author of quite late date Psalms 
which we had always identified with the ro¬ 
mantic figure of David the shepherd king—but 
I want to insist upon it that the religious value 
of a Psalm in no way depends upon any ques¬ 
tion of its authorship or date. 

I would not say that questions of date and 
authorship do not affect the value of historic 
books like the Gospels and the book of the. 
Acts. Quite obviously they do. We should 
have less confidence in the historic accuracy of 
the events they narrate if it could be proven 
that the Gospels themselves were late produc¬ 
tions. But in a purely religious book such as 
the book of Psalms, questions of date or auth¬ 
orship scarcely count. I think Christian people 
have often given themselves quite needless 
trouble by imagining that these literary ques¬ 
tions which scholars have been for the past 
fifty years or more discussing somehow or 
other menaced the truth of the inspiration of 
the Bible. A moment’s thought, however, will 
show that they do not and can not. It would 

[17] 







THE KING OF LOVE 


do us a world of good to get hold of a simple 
truth like this—a passage of Scripture is in¬ 
spired not because a certain man wrote it, but 
because God speaks through it. That is really 
what inspiration means—or rather that is what 
we mean when we say a verse, a paragraph, a 
book is inspired—we mean that in it and 
through it we can hear the voice of God. The 
value of a verse of Scripture, therefore, does 
not at all consist in the fact that David or 
Isaiah wrote it, but in the fact that it conveys 
religious truth and that through it God speaks 
to the soul. And therefore this follows—and 
this is the point I want to get home—if through 
a passage of Scripture God plainly speaks to 
the soul, it does not cease to be inspired even 
though it should be proved that neither David 
nor Isaiah wrote it, but some saint of God 
whose name has perished out of memory. I 
will venture to say that in actual practice we 
recognize the truth of all this, for when we read 
the great words of Scripture—its assertions 
about God, its glowing promises, its mighty 

[18] 



THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


words of inspiration, its splendid anticipations 
of the future—we never trouble our heads as to 
who wrote them. What matters who the 
human mouthpiece may have been, if we 
hear the voice of God in them. So it would 
not disturb me very much, nor would it— 
for me—in the slightest degree detract from 
the spiritual value of this Psalm, if the critics 
should be able to demonstrate that it was not 
written by David after all. There are some 
who take that position, as you know. They 
say that the Psalmist here is not really speaking 
in his own name—he is speaking in the name 
of the nation. It is Israel—speaking through 
the Psalmist—who says “ the Lord is my shep¬ 
herd.” And they go on to say that such a 
Psalm as this, so full of serene and quiet confi¬ 
dence, could never have been written in the 
time of a nation’s youth. “ A long experi¬ 
ence,” they say, “ of need and trouble, as well 
as of comfort and help, lies behind this Psalm.” 

Now all this seems to me a case of the over¬ 
refinement of criticism. This habit of de- 

[19] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


personalizing Scripture and of regarding indi¬ 
vidual assertions as made—not of the individ¬ 
ual, as the plain sense of the passage would 
suggest, but of the community—has become a 
craze with some critics. One has only to read 
this little Psalm to feel that it is far too inti¬ 
mate and personal to be referred to the nation 
of Israel. Such an idea takes all the pith and 
glow and warmth out of the Psalm. It is not a 
community that speaks here, but an individual 
pouring out his own trust and confidence in 
God. And as for their assertion that a great 
deal of need and trouble, as well as of comfort 
and help, lie behind this Psalm, they forget that 
all the experience of need and trouble, of com¬ 
fort and help, which the Psalm demands can be 
compassed within the limits of a single life. I 
agree that this is not a Psalm of youth, it is a 
Psalm of experienced manhood, if not of age. 
But the plain and obvious account of the 
Psalm is, I am persuaded, in this case the true 
account—this is the outpouring of the heart of 
a man who has had his share of trial and 


[20] 





THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


trouble, but who has found that the Lord keeps 
him from all harm. And in all the history of 
Israel I know of no individual from whose lips 
and from whose heart this Psalm is more likely 
to have come than from the shepherd king to 
whom the title assigns it. So—although I re¬ 
peat that the spiritual value of the Psalm would 
be in no way impaired should the title by fur¬ 
ther research be proved to be incorrect—I am 
going, in my exposition of the Psalm, to take 
it for granted that it is in very deed a Psalm of 
David. But of David in his old age. David in 
his youth could not have sung this Psalm. He 
had to pass through these vicissitudes, of which 
his career was full, before he could indite this 
Psalm. Which of our own poets is it that 
says: 

“ Most wretched men 
Are cradled into poetry by wrong; 

They learn by suffering what they teach in song ” ? 

There is a bitter tang about that couplet, but 
there is a truth in it: men have to experience 

[ 21 ] 





THE KING OF LOVE 


life before they can really speak about it. And 
David had to experience danger and trouble 
before he could speak of God’s keeping care. 
The David who wrote this Psalm was not the 
care-free shepherd lad of Bethlehem, but the 
David who had been a hunted outlaw, the 
David who had been relentlessly pursued by 
the murderous wrath of King Saul, the David 
against whom his son Absalom had rebelled, 
and who had seen his kingdom fall away from 
him, the David who in the course of life had 
been led into many a valley of deep gloom, but 
who nevertheless ended his days in honour and 
quietness and peace. And it adds enormously 
to the comforting power of the Psalm that it 
is such a man who sings it. This is not the 
bright but baseless optimism of youth. This is 
not the cheerfulness of the untried. This is the 
testimony of a man who has been through the 
fire; this is the witness of a man who has strug¬ 
gled in the floods of deep waters. This man 
speaks what he knows and testifies what he has 
seen. He has faced life’s difficulties, its disap- 

[ 22 ] 




THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


pointments, its crushing sorrows, and this is 
his resulting testimony that God has been to 
him so kind and faithful a shepherd, that he 
has absolutely no fear as to what coming days 
may bring. His temper is one of serene and 
happy trust. “ The Lord is my shepherd, I 
shall not want.” 

GOD-THE SHEPHERD 

This image of the “ shepherd ” was a per¬ 
fectly natural one for the Hebrews to apply to 
God. They were themselves a nation of shep¬ 
herds. So, as early as the days of the patri¬ 
arch Jacob, we find the name applied to God. 
But if it was natural for the people as a whole 
—because predominantly they were a pastoral 
people—it was doubly natural on David’s lips, 
for he had been a shepherd himself. The old 
man’s most vivid recollections are not those of 
recent happenings, but of those of his youthful 
days. He can remember the events of forty 
years ago better than he can those of a fort¬ 
night past. In this Psalm David is back again 

[ 23 ] 






THE KING OE LOVE 


in those happy days when as a lad he used to 
keep the sheep of his father Jesse in the fields 
and on the hills of Bethlehem. He remembered 
what care he used to take that they should be 
properly fed and how on burning days of heat 
he used to lead them to quiet spots where they 
could refresh themselves with shade and water. 
And he remembered, too, how he had to guard 
them against the attacks of savage beasts. Two 
occasions came back vividly to his mind, the 
one when he had to fight with a lion and the 
other when he had to fight with a bear, each of 
which had taken a lamb out of the flock, and 
how he had killed both and rescued the living 
but terrified lambs out of their jaws. And, 
looking back over his own life beset by perils 
and dangers as it had been, David feels that 
God had protected him and cared for him just 
as he, in those far, off days, had protected and 
cared for his father’s sheep. “ The Lord is 
my shepherd.” 

Now, to appreciate the full force of the state¬ 
ment in this opening clause, you must always 

[ 24 ] 




THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


remember that the “ shepherd ” David is think¬ 
ing of is such a shepherd as he himself had 
been. I have no word to speak by way of dis¬ 
paragement to speak of our shepherds of today, 
they are, speaking generally, kindly, helpful, 
compassionate men. But in the nature of 
things there could not be between our shep¬ 
herds and their sheep the kind of tender, per¬ 
sonal relation there was between the Eastern 
shepherd and his sheep. You perhaps remem¬ 
ber how F. W. Robertson, preaching on the 
text, “ I am the good shepherd,” emphasizes 
this point. He says: “You must try to feel 
what the lowly Syrian shepherd must feel 
towards the helpless things which are the com¬ 
panions of his daily life, for whose safety he 
stands in jeopardy every hour, and whose value 
is measurable to him, not by price, but by his 
own jeopardy, and then we have some notion 
of the love the Psalmist meant to represent, the 
Eternal Tenderness which bends over us and 
knows the name of each, the trials of each, and 
thinks for each with a separate solicitude, and 

[ 25 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


gave Himself for each with a sacrifice as special 
and a love as personal as if in the whole world’s 
wilderness there were none other but that one.” 
That is true, you must try to imagine all that. 
All that God is to us. “ The Lord is my 
shepherd.” 

“ My shepherd ”—it is a personal and indi¬ 
vidual relationship. The emphasis of the Bible 
is ever on the individual. The modern tend¬ 
ency (perhaps, indeed, it always has been the 
tendency) is to lose sight of the unit in the 
crowd; to merge the individual in the mass. It 
is only a few highly placed or greatly gifted 
individuals who seem worth counting sepa¬ 
rately. But the Bible individualizes. It per¬ 
sonalizes. God loves not masses, but men, indi¬ 
vidual men. God has an eye for the unit, for 
the humblest and most modest unit. “ This 
poor man cried; the Lord heard him.” His 
care is an individual care. His love is a per¬ 
sonal love. “ He calleth his own sheep by 
name.” Do you remember how St. Paul, con¬ 
templating Christ’s cross, takes that mighty 

[ 26 ] 




THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


sacrifice all to himself and cries, “ The Son of 
God loved me and gave himself for me! ” Cal¬ 
vary was all for him, he says. And he implies 
that if he had been the only lost sinner in the 
world Christ would have thought it worth His 
while to bear that cross in order to redeem him. 
But it is not alone a great Apostle like St. Paul 
who can say it. You and I can say it. The 
humblest of God’s human creatures can say it. 
For our Lord has told us the same thing Him¬ 
self. He said one day that if out of his flock 

of a hundred sheep but one had gone astray, 

% 

that He would have gone after that one until 
He found it. One! Yes, if that one had been 
you or I, the Lord would have gone out into 
that wilderness in which He felt desolate and 
homeless and He would have climbed that hill 
on which He shed His blood in order to find us. 
The Lord’s love is an individual love and His 
redemption is an individual redemption. 

And what is true of the Son is equally true 
of the Father. It is all set forth in this little 
phrase: “ The Lord is my shepherd.” God’s 

[ 27 ] 





THE KING OF LOVE 


relation to you and me and all men is a personal 
and individual relation. And herein consists 
the real greatness of man—the real greatness of 
the most insignificant of men—he is great 
enough for God’s individual love and care. It 
is of no use trying to prove to me the greatness 
of man by saying that one man wrote an Iliad 
and another a Hamlet and another a Paradise 
Lost; that one man painted a Sistine Madonna 
and another composed a Hallelujah Chorus and 
another built a St. Paul’s Cathedral. These 
statements bring me no assurance of my great¬ 
ness and worth. For the men who accom¬ 
plished these things were geniuses, they did not 
belong to the common run of men. The aver¬ 
age man knows well enough that Iliads and 
Hamlets and Hallelujah Choruses and St. 
Paul’s Cathedrals are clean beyond him. What 
of this average man, this commonplace man, 
this man whose fame has not spread to the next 
street? And not only what of the average 
man, but what of the utterly insignificant man, 
the absolutely sunken and degraded man ? 

[ 28 ] 




THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


How great is he? Well, he is great enough for 
God’s individual love and care. He is great 
enough for God to send His son to be born at 
Bethlehem and to die on Calvary for his sake. 
That is man’s worth, your worth and my 
worth, and every man’s worth. We are great 
enough for the measureless love and infinite 
sacrifice of God. It is all in this verse: “ The 
Lord is my shepherd.” 

man's freedom from care 

This is a tremendous statement about God. 
But David had found it to be literally true so 
far as he was concerned. Now look at the 
consequence for David of this mighty fact of 
the individual love and care of God. “ The 
Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. There¬ 
fore,” is the Prayer Book rendering, “ can I 
lack nothing.” Moses, looking back over the 
forty years in the wilderness, declared to Israel, 
“ These forty years the Lord thy God hath been 
with thee; thou hast lacked nothing.” That 
was a wonderful testimony, but this is a more 

[ 29 ] 




THE KING OP LOVE 


amazing assertion still. David’s eye does more 
than sweep over the past, it takes in the future 
as well. “ I shall not want.” Because God 
cared for him with this individual love and 
care, therefore he could lack nothing—he could 
never be left bereft of anything he needed. 

This little sentence, Bishop Perowne says, 
strikes the keynote of the Psalm. That key¬ 
note is one of serene and happy confidence. It 
is not the only place in the Bible where the note 
is struck. It is struck again and again in the 
Psalms. “ In God will I put my trust,” says 
another Psalm. “ I will not be afraid, what 
can man do unto me ? ” “ God is my salva¬ 

tion ” says Isaiah. “ I will trust and not be 
afraid.” It is indeed one of the commonplaces 
of the old Book. But nowhere is it more 
beautifully stated than here. “ The Lord is 
my shepherd ... I shall not want.” Take the 
two sentences together and they have all the 
force of an irrefragable argument. If the 
premiss of the first sentence is true, then the 
consequence of the second inevitably follows. 

[ 30 ] 





THE SHEPHERD PSALM 


If the Lord is our shepherd, then we simply 
cannot want. For, you will notice, it is of 
“ the Lord ” this is said, the one and only 
Potentate, “ King of kings and Lord of lords.” 
It is the mighty Lord who is our shepherd. In 
Him, that is to say, love is combined with 
power. Love without power is not enough to 
give us quietness and rest. Love is mighty, but 
it is not omnipotent, and if it was only love 
that was caring we could not be sure that we 
should never want. Do you remember how 
helpless we were to assist Rumania in the 
hour of her bitter need? We badly wanted 
to help, but we couldn’t. I suppose the might¬ 
iest human love is a mother’s. But a mother’s 
love cannot do what it wishes to do for, say, a 
sick child. But our shepherd is the mighty 
Lord. His power is as great as His love. 
There is no emergency in which He cannot 
help. There is no crisis in which His care is 
not sufficient. 

I read again this last summer Alphonse 
Daudet’s account of the passing of his friend 

[ 31 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


Edmond de Goncourt. “ My wife,” he says, 
“ prayed and wept upon her knees at the foot 
of the bed. I, who knew no prayer, held his 
hand in mine, bending over him, my tears 
mingled with the death-dew upon his brow. I 
spoke to him quite low, quite clear. ‘ My 
friend, it is I; I am here quite close/ I do not 
know if he could hear me.” There you have a 
picture of the impotence of human love in the 
supreme hour. But even then the mighty Lord 
can care. “ When thou passest through the 
River I will be with thee.” For all time, and 
for every experience that life can bring, we 
are safe in this guardianship. “ The Lord is 
my shepherd. I shall not want.” The man 
who knows that God is caring for him need 
have no cares about himself. “ Be not anx¬ 
ious,” Jesus said, “ your Father knoweth.” All 
things will work together for his good. And 
so we may have that assurance. We have but 
to commit ourselves into God’s keeping and we, 
too, can say with David, “ The Lord is my 
shepherd. I shall not want.” 

[ 32 ] 




II 

THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


The Lord is my shepherd, no want shall I know; 

I feed in green pastures, safe-folded I rest: 

He leadeth my soul where the still waters flow, 
Restores me when wandering, redeems when op¬ 
pressed. 

Through the valley and shadow of death though I 
stray, 

Since Thou art my guardian no evil I fear; 

Thy rod shall defend me, Thy staff be my stay; 

No harm can befall, with my Comforter near. 

In the midst of affliction my table is spread; 

With blessings unmeasured my cup runneth o’er; 
With perfume and oil Thou anointest my head: 

O what shall I ask of Thy providence more? 

Let goodness and mercy, my bountiful God, 

Still follow my steps till I meet Thee above; 

I seek, by the paths which my forefathers trod 
Through the land of their sojourn, Thy Kingdom 
of love. 


Janies Montgomery . 


II 


THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 

“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; 
He leadeth me beside the still waters ” 

I N the preceding chapter I had so much to 
say by way of introduction that I had no 
time to do anything like justice to the con¬ 
tents of that first verse with which I was sup¬ 
posed to be dealing. So before entering upon 
the consideration of verse two, I want to turn 
back for a moment and say a word or two 
further about the great assertion with which 
the Psalm opens. In speaking about God as 
the shepherd, I laid the main stress upon the 
tenderness and loving care of God which the 
figure quite evidently suggests. But that is not 
the only idea suggested by the figure. Dr. 
Davison, in his admirable little commentary 
upon the Psalms, insists upon it that more 
prominent even than the ideas of care and ten- 

[ 35 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


derness are the ideas of strength and wisdom 
and authority. In the Old Testament the shep¬ 
herd is essentially a ruler. The king, for in¬ 
stance, was the shepherd of his. people. In that 
most precious of all allegories in which Jesus 
speaks of Himself as the good shepherd, while 
there is exquisite tenderness and love in it, there 
is also the unmistakable note of authority. In¬ 
deed it is on that note of authority He brings 
the allegory to a finish. So when we think of 
God as the shepherd, we must not emasculate 
the figure. There is force and vigour and 
power and authority in it as well as tender love. 

We find extraordinary difficulty in combin¬ 
ing together the ideas of power and gentleness, 
strength and tenderness, authority and grace, 
love and holiness. I suppose that is because in 
men they so seldom co-exist that we have come 
to look upon them as being mutually exclusive. 
It is a common saying amongst us that “ a man 
suffers from the defects of his qualities.” That 
is to say, if a man is conspicuously strong, he 
is very rarely gentle as well; if he is more than 

[ 36 ] 




THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


ordinarily forceful, he is. not as a rule tender 
and considerate. On the other hand, if he is 
notable for his tenderness, he is not as a rule 
strong, and if he is more than usually gentle, 
he is as a rule lacking in force. The strong 
and forceful man is as a rule aggressive and 
rough. The tender and gentle person is as a 
rule yielding and soft. This is so much so that 
we have come to regard these qualities as being 
contradictories and therefore as being as mutu¬ 
ally exclusive as light and darkness. But that 
is only because human nature as we see it is so 
partial and one-sided and incomplete. Our sin 
has warped and distorted this nature of ours. 
It was made in the image of God, but we have 
mutilated and disfigured it. In human nature 
as God meant it to be these various qualities 
that seem to us almost contradictory and ex¬ 
clusive, were meant to co-exist in perfect bal¬ 
ance and equipoise. They do so co-exist in the 
one absolutely perfect life this world has seen. 
The characteristic of Jesus is His balance, the 
combination in Him of seemingly opposite 

[ 37 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


qualities. He is like that city which the seer 
saw, of which he says that the length and 
breadth and the height of it are equal. Jesus’ 
character was four-square like that. He was 
strong, He was tender, He was self-assertive 
and self-forgetful, He was authoritative and 
He was humble, He was holy and He was 
merciful. You can gather that contrasted 
qualities existed side by side in the character of 
Jesus from the guesses men made as to His 
identity. For some thought He was Elijah 
and others thought He was Jeremiah. Now, 
two more contrasted characters than Elijah and 
Jeremiah could not very well be conceived. 
Elijah was all fire; Jeremiah was melting ten¬ 
derness. Elijah was like a whirlwind; Jere¬ 
miah’s head was a fountain of tears. And yet 
to some people Jesus appeared like Elijah, and 
to others He appeared like Jeremiah. The fact 
is that the fire of the one prophet and the ten¬ 
derness of the other met in Him. He was 
Elijah when sweeping the mob of traffickers 
out of the temple courts. He was Jeremiah 

[ 38 ] 




THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


when weeping over Jerusalem’s wayward and 
disobedient people. These seemingly contrasted 
qualities of strength and tenderness met in Him 
in perfect poise. And they meet similarly in 
the character of God. They are suggested by 
this title “ shepherd,” which is applied to Him 
here. There is more than the idea of tender 
care in it—there is strength and authority in 
it as well. 

Indeed, as I said in the preceding chapter— 
though I had not sufficient space adequately to 
develop the thought—the truth that God is our 
shepherd would not comfort us very much if 
the only ideas it conveyed were those of love 
and tender care. If we are to enjoy protection 
and safety, our shepherd must not only be gen¬ 
tle, he must be brave; he must not only be 
tender, he must be strong. The literal shepherd 
had to be both. David himself had to be both. 
He could never have been a successful shep¬ 
herd of his father Jesse’s sheep if he had not 
been both. He had to be tender in his dealing 
with the sheep themselves; he had to be gentle 

[ 39 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


in his treatment of the ewes and the lambs. 
But he had to be brave enough to stand up 
against the wild beasts who threatened their 
safety; he had to be strong enough to over¬ 
come any lion or bear that dared attack his 
helpless charges. David was both—tender to 
the sheep, terrible to the foes that threatened 
their safety and their peace. And our shepherd 
is God. In Him love and power unite; in 
Him strength and tenderness are perfectly 
blended. Love by itself would not have been 
sufficient. Love is often baffled and beaten and 
broken. Do you remember G. F. Watts’ 
picture “ Love and Death ” ? There Love is 
depicted as a boy—a weak and tender boy— 
Death is represented as a great and towering, 
solemn figure, with strength in its every line. 
And what can little Love do against that 
mighty and ruthless giant? Love is powerless 
to stay his course or to deny him entrance. 
And that picture is just a parable. Love is 
helpless against many of the foes that beset us 
as we journey through life. Here is Love in 

[ 40 ] 





THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


the person of a mother here at home, and 
away yonder in some distant land is a child 
fighting for life. What can Love do? Here is 
Love in the person of a father in a quiet little 
country home and away in the big town is a 
son beset by sore temptation, whose soul is 
amongst lions—what can Love do? Love 
often wants to help and cannot. Its power is 
not equal to> its desire. 

But in God there is power to do all that love 
desires. “ Many are the afflictions of the 
righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of 
them all.” There is in God strength to perform 
all that He wishes to do for us. “ He deliver¬ 
eth him out of them all.” He is able to save 
man from the foes that beset his way and lie in 
wait for his soul. He is able to save from the 
assaults of temptation. He is able to save from 
the power of sin. He is able to save in the hour 
of death. “ He delivereth him out of them all.” 
Our Shepherd is strong as well as gentle. The 
sheep are perfectly safe in His charge. “ No 
one can pluck them out of my Father’s hands.” 

[ 41 ] 






THE KING OP LOVE 


Now the second verse—to which we are to 
turn our attention in our present study—has in 
it these ideas of wisdom and strength and 
authority, as well as of tender care. “ He 
maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He 
leadeth me beside the still waters.” In all this 
the shepherd just showed his shepherd's craft. 
There are some commentators who think that 
in verses two, three and four the Psalm de¬ 
scribes the morning, afternoon and evening of 
the shepherd’s day. But this reference to 
morning, afternoon and evening can only be 
secured by forced interpretation and by read¬ 
ing into the verses ideas which to the plain man 
do not appear to be there at all. I think we had 
better disregard all such explanations altogether 
as being artificial and purely imaginative. This 
verse two is not nearly so descriptive of the 
morning as it is of the fierce noonday and the 
sultry afternoon. What the shepherd who 
knows his business does when the sun is high in 
the heavens and the heat is fierce is this: he 
searches out some cool, green meadow by the 

[ 42 ] 





THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


water courses which cause the grass to grow, 
and there he causes his flock to lie down and 
rest. He is able to make them lie down in 
green pastures and to lead them by the still 
waters, because he knows all about that country¬ 
side. He has been over the ground, many a 
time, with the thought of the welfare of his 
flock ever in his mind. The wisdom of the 
shepherd is in all this, and his authority, too, 
for if he leads his flock into the green pastures 
it is because his sheep hear his voice and they 
follow him. 


god's nourishment 

And all this is true of God. He is the shep¬ 
herd who leads the flock into the green pastures 
and by the still waters. “ Pastures . . . 
waters”—what do the two words suggest? 
Nourishment and support. That is what the 
sheep needs for its life—pasture and water. 
And that is the first thing a verse like this 
teaches me—that for the sustenance and sup¬ 
port of his people, God richly provides. I turn 

[ 43 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


to the New Testament allegory which is the 
counterpart of this Old Testament Psalm and I 
find Jesus saying this: “ By me if any man en¬ 
ter in, he shall go in and go out and shall find 
pasture.” It is exactly the same promise. God 
will amply provide for the support of those who 
obey Plim and follow Him. I do not know 
which idea is most prominent in David’s mind 
in this verse—whether physical or spiritual sup¬ 
port. Probably both are there. There is a sense 
in which all people are the flock of God in that 
all men depend on Him for life and breath and 
all things. He makes grass to grow for the 
cattle and corn for the service of man. He 
brought Israel through the waste and howling 
wilderness, and they lacked nothing, for He 
rained down manna upon them from heaven 
and brought water for them from the living 
rock. And still He feeds and maintains His 
human children. We sit down every day to His 
table. He opens His hands and satisfies the 
desire of every living thing. He makes His 
sun to shine and His rain to fall on the just 

[ 44 ] 




THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


and the unjust. God never fails His chil¬ 
dren. Take the world as a whole and there 
is always enough and to spare for all its 
people. 

But it was of the support of the soul that 
Jesus was mainly thinking in His allegory, and 
it is of that spiritual support I would speak for 
a minute or two. The Christian life—the life 
of discipleship to which the shepherd calls us— 
is a hard and strenuous life. It is a life that 
makes heavy demands upon us. If we are to 
live it at all, we need rich and constant support. 
You remember how, during rationing time, 
extra rations were allowed to men who had 
heavy and labourious work to do—the men in 
the shipyards and the engineering shops, for in¬ 
stance. The authorities realized that extra sup¬ 
port was necessary for specially exhausting toil. 
Well, the Christian life makes extra and heavy 
demands upon a man as compared, say, with 
the ordinary, conventionally respectable life 
that passes muster with society. This latter 
life a man, perhaps, may live in his own 

[ 45 ] 





THE KING OF LOVE 


strength, but not the Christian life of purity 
and sacrifice and service. We need extra 
power if we are to live that life. And the 
Shepherd sees to it that we get it. The fact is 
that for the biggest and heaviest demand there 
is always the sufficient grace. When the day 
is extra trying, the Shepherd has always the 
green pastures and still waters at hand for our 
refreshment. What I mean, quite simply, is 
this: that if we honestly commit ourselves to 
the Christian life, God will see to it that the 
support is forthcoming. We need not shrink 
from it because of the difficulty—power more 
than sufficient will be supplied. 

“ Pastures . . . still waters.” And if you 
ask me what are the pastures and still waters 
by means of which God makes us equal to the 
demands of the Christian life, well, perhaps I 
may pass by other and lesser sources of nour¬ 
ishment and say simply Jesus Christ. “ Pas¬ 
tures.” “ I,” said He, “ am the Bread of life.” 
“ Still waters ” ? “ Whosoever shall drink of 
the water that I shall give him,” He said, 

[ 46 ] 




THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


“ shall never thirst.” Bread and water—the 
necessities of life and power are there in un¬ 
limited supply—we get them in Christ. That 
is to say, we get the strength to follow the 
Christ without by having a Christ within. The 
body feeds upon bread, but the soul is nour¬ 
ished and fed by Christ, and so nourished and 
fed it is equal to every emergency that life may 
bring. This is not empty rhetoric. It is just 
plain and sober fact. It is verified by human 
experience. Here, for instance, is one who 
cries, “ I can do all things in Christ who 
strengthened me.” He had had his full share 
of difficulty and trial and trouble, but he had 
overcome through Christ who loved him. 
There is, therefore, no need for us to cower 
and tremble before the difficulties of the 
Christian life, and there is no need to go on 
our way limping and enfeebled. In Christ 
God has prepared green pastures and still 
waters for the nourishment of the soul, and 
in Him we may have all sufficiency, always, for 
all things. 


[ 47 ] 





THE KING OF LOVE 


god's kindness 

But I see more in this little verse than the 
promise of nourishment. I see in it a hint of 
the kindness of God. “ He maketh me to lie 
down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside 
the still waters.” “ Green pastures . . . still 
waters.” There is music in the very phrases. 
There is charm and beauty in the picture they 
conjure up before the mental vision. I wonder 
whether I am reading into it what I have no 
business to read into it when I suggest that the 
phrase declares that on the whole life is good? 
That is how David describes his life as he 
looks back on it. God had given him green 
pastures to lie down in and had led him by 
still waters. It wasn't that David had not had 
his troubles. He had had many, and they were 
deep and bitter. Yet he bears his witness that 
on the whole life had been an affair of “ green 
pastures and still waters.” I like the cheerful¬ 
ness of this testimony, and I like it not simply 
because it is cheerful, but also because it is 
deeply and profoundly true. We have phrases 

[ 48 ] 





THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


in current use which describe life unfavourably 
—life is just a “ vale of tears, it is a wilderness 
journey, it is a long exile.” I think the modern 
tendency is to emphasize the sad and sorrowful 
and painful aspects of life, hence the pessimistic 
note that characterizes much of our present- 
day literature. 

Now it would be foolish to ignore the fact 
that there is much that is sad and hard and 
painful in life. There come times to us when 
we are ready to assent to the dictum that life 
is a vale of tears and that the world is a deso¬ 
late wilderness. But it is just as well that we 
should remember that on the whole the joys 
outbalance the sorrows, and the pleasures out¬ 
balance the pains. The reason why people are 
so apt to speak harshly and disparagingly of 
life is this: that pain makes a much deeper im¬ 
pression than joy. A week’s illness will make 
us forget months and years of health. One 
worry will obliterate from our minds the mem¬ 
ory of days which were full of pleasantness and 
peace. A grief will make us forget the years 

[ 49 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


during which the family circle was unbroken. 
The fact is we take our happiness and health 
and family blessings as a matter of course, but 
when some blow comes upon us which robs us 
of one or the other of them, that one black 
cloud fills up all our horizon. But if we really 
took stock of things, we should find our bless¬ 
ings far outnumber our losses and griefs. We 
grumble about the weather. We cry out that 
it always rains. That is just sheer petulance. 
If we took the trouble to watch and count we 
should find the sun shines far oftener than the 
rain falls. The newspapers do us a distinct 
disservice in this regard. They emphasize the 
abnormal. They are full of dreadful stories of 
hate and bloodshed and adultery and theft. If 
you had only the newspapers to go by, you 
might think that all society was corrupt—a 
mass of wounds and bruises and festering 
sores. But as a matter of fact, the great mass 
of men are decent, kindly people who hate vio¬ 
lence and wrong; the great majority of homes 
are marked by a quiet happiness and deep af- 

[ 50 ] 




THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


fection. Crime and lust are the abnormal, ex¬ 
ceptional things. They command attention. 
They get talked about. But the honest, kindly 
people who do their duty to one another and to 
the state, never get talked about at all. But 
they are in the majority nevertheless. 

When there is a crash on a railroad we talk 
of it for days, but we never mention the fact 
that every day the railways carry millions of 
people in safety. There is a sentence in one of 
the most familiar Psalms which says, “ Forget 
not all His benefits.” But that is exactly what 
we are prone to do. If we only did not forget, 
if we counted our blessings, we should find the 
benefits far outnumbered the deprivations, that 
the bright days outnumbered the dark days, and 
that pleasure far outbalanced pain. God cares 
not only for our subsistence, but for our hap¬ 
piness as well. This is a brave, cheerful retro¬ 
spect of life, and it is as true as it is brave and 
cheerful. “ Thou makest me to lie down in 
green pastures, thou leadest me beside the still 
waters.” 


[ 51 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


WHAT ARE GREEN PASTURES? 

But not only does a sentence like this suggest 
that life on the balance is a good and pleasant 
thing, but it suggests the further fact that what 
at the moment looked a bit of stony wilderness 
in the retrospect is seen to be a “ green pas¬ 
ture.” For this Psalm is a bit of retrospect. 
This is the old man David looking back and 
telling us what in the course of life he had 
found God to be. And that is his verdict as he 
looks back. Life under God’s blessing and 
guidance had been an affair of “ green pas¬ 
tures ” and “ still waters.” But I do- not think 
David would have said as much as that while 
events were actually in process—when he was 
being hunted by Saul like a partridge on the 
mountains, when he was treated as an outcast 
and an outlaw and was compelled to take serv¬ 
ice with the Philistines. I don’t think he would 
have said he was being made to lie down in 
“ green pastures.” When pestilence smote his 
land, when hatred and murder penetrated his 
family circle, when Absalom rebelled against 

[ 52 ] 




THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


him and he had to flee for very life. I don’t 
think he would have said he was being led be¬ 
side the “ still waters.” 

I think these things went sorely against the 
grain with him at the time. He would have 
escaped them if he possibly could. I wonder if 
it is at all fanciful to read a suggestion of com¬ 
pulsion and constraint into that phrase “ thou 
makest me to lie down in green pastures ” ? 
The shepherd, as one commentator says, 
stretches out the limbs of the sheep in order to 
make them repose. Perhaps the sheep would 
not have chosen that particular spot. The 
shepherd chooses it for it. “ Thou makest me 
to lie down in green pastures.” And God by 
the pressure and constraint of his Providence 
constrained David to pass through these 
troubled and troublous experiences of his. 
David would never have chosen them for him¬ 
self. To him they appeared just sheer ills— 
bits of stony wilderness he would fain have 
avoided. But in what David thought a bit of 
stony wilderness God saw “ green pastures.” 

[ 53 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


In what David reckoned to be mere and sheer 
ills, God saw sources of blessing to the soul— 
so He made him to lie down in green pas¬ 
tures. For trouble and sorrow and loss, 
though they seem such harsh and forbidding 
things, provide often rich nourishment for 
the soul. “ Tribulation worketh patience; and 
patience experience, and experience hope: and 
hope maketh not ashamed.” “ No chastening 
for the present seemeth to be joyous but griev¬ 
ous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the 
peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them 
which are exercised thereby.” 

You remember how Greatheart in the Pil¬ 
grim describes the Valley of Humiliation as the 
best and most fruitful land in all those parts, 
and how that Mercy protested that she was as 
well in that Valley as she had been anywhere 
else in all their journey. That is only the old 
Dreamer’s way of saying that bare and sterile 
places have often turned out to be “ green pas¬ 
tures.” And that is why God “ makes us to lie 
down ” in places from which we shrink. That 

[ 54 ] 




THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


is why He allows loss and trouble and disap¬ 
pointment to befall us. He knows what graces 
these things and their like beget in the soul, 
how they breed sympathy and tenderness and 
humility and dependence on God. They are 
indeed amongst the richest and most succulent 
pastures. And so God makes us to lie down in 
them in spite of ourselves. And later we come 
to recognize His wisdom. We realize the gain 
that has come to us. “ It was good for me that 
I was afflicted.” That was a man for whom 
the wilderness had been changed into the 
“ green pastures.” It is only in retrospect we 
recognize all this. While we are in the midst 
of life’s hardnesses and difficulties and trials 
they may appear to us to be anything but 
“ green pastures.” But when we look back, in 
the mellow light of life’s evening time, we shall 
realize we owe some of life’s richest blessings 
to its troubled times, and shall be ready with 
David to confess “ Thou makest me to lie down 
in green pastures, thou leadest me beside the 
still waters.” 


[ 55 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


THE STILE WATERS 

“ Thou leadest me beside the still waters,” or 
rather “ by the waters of rest.” It was rest, a 
resting place, Israel sought all through the 
forty years of wandering in the wilderness. 
They thought they would find it in Canaan. 
But they were disappointed. The fact is, the 
soul of man can never settle down and rest in 
any earthly home, it can only rest in God. And 
this Psalmist had found his centre. David had 
found his rest and peace in God. And that is 
still the shepherd’s gift. He leadeth us beside 
the still waters. “ Come unto me,” He said, 
“ all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and 
1 will give you rest.” And I wonder whether I 
am pressing the phrase too far when I say that 
here I get a hint of the end of the shepherd’s 
guidance. He leads us to the waters of rest. 
There remaineth a rest for the people of God. 
You remember what the prophet says about the 
sea. “ There is sorrow on the sea, it cannot be 
quiet.” That is like life. It is always restless, 
stormy, troubled. There is a sea in the next 

[ 56 ] 





THE SHEPHERD’S LEADING 


world, but it is a sea of glass, on which no 
storm beats and no gale blows—a sea of glass 
mingled with fire—calm, untroubled, glorious. 
And to the shores of that sea, the shepherd will 
bring us at last, where the storm-tossed soul 
finds quiet and the restless heart finds peace. 
“ He leadeth, me beside the still waters.” 


i 


[ 57 ] 















Ill 


RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


The Lord my pasture shall prepare, 

And feed me with a shepherd’s care; 

His presence shall my want supply, 

And guard me with a watchful eye, 

My noonday walks He shall attend, 

And all my midnight hours attend. 

When in the sultry glebe I faint, 

Or on the thirsty mountain pant, 

To fertile vales and dewy meads 
My weary, wandering steps He leads 
Where peaceful rivers soft and slow 
Amid the verdant landscape flow. 

Though in a bare and rugged way 
Through devious, lonely wilds I stray, 

Thy bounty shall my paths beguile ; 

The barren wilderness shall smile, 

With sudden greens and herbage crowned, 
And streams shall murmur all around. 

Though in the path of death I tread, 

With gloomy horrors overspread, 

My steadfast heart shall fear no ill 
For Thou, O Lord, art with me still; 

Thy friendly crook shall give me aid, 

And guide me through the dreadful shade. 

—Joseph Addison . 


Ill 


RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 

“He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the 
paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” 

I am not sure that the opening sentence of 
this verse three does not properly belong to 
verse two. At any rate, it attaches itself 
closely to it and follows naturally and logically 
upon it. Indeed the two clauses of verse two 
and the opening clause of verse three form a 
sequence, with this latter as a sort of climax. 
“ He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, 
he leadeth me beside the still waters,” and the 
result and consequence is that “ he restoreth 
my soul.” You must imagine a fiercely hot 
Eastern day and the sheep becoming weary and 
exhausted and spent. The wise shepherd, 
under those circumstances, will lead them into 
some cool and sheltered place where there is 
food and drink to be had in order that they 

[ 61 ] . 


THE KING OF LOVE 


may recruit their flagging energies and renew 
their strength. The purpose of the green 
pastures and the still waters is the restoration 
of the soul. Only “ soul ” is not exactly the 
word we should use in the case of the renewing 
of a sheep’s energies. “ Life ” is the word we 
should have used of sheep. But in this Psalm, 
as Dr. Davison says, the natural and the spir¬ 
itual, the symbol and the thing symbolized, are 
inextricably blended together and shade ofif into 
one another. And in this little phrase the 
thought of the shepherd and his sheep is almost 
submerged in the thought of God and man. 
That is why he says here “ He restoreth my 
soul.” 

I cannot help thinking that back of this little 
phrase there lies a great experience. I cannot 
help thinking that David had a particular epi¬ 
sode of his life in his mind when, but for God’s 
love and care and concern, he might have lost 
his soul. And if you ask me what particular 
episode it was that David had in his mind, I 
reply it was that terrible and shameful episode 

[ 62 ] 




RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


of his sin with Bathsheba. David’s soul was 
in peril many a time in the course of his life, 
but never in such dire and deadly peril as then. 
He sacrificed every consideration of honour 
and loyalty on the altar of his lust. He forgot 
his duty both to God and to his neighbour. He 
cast purity and honour to the wind, and reck¬ 
lessly plunged into sensuality and crime. If it 
had not been the Lord who was on his side, the 
waters had overwhelmed him, the stream had 
gone over his soul, then the proud waters had 
gone over his soul, and he would have been 
drowned in destruction and perdition. But the 
Lord was his shepherd and saw his danger and 
sent Nathan to him to rouse his sleeping con¬ 
science by the story of the rich man with his 
flocks and herds who robbed the poor man, his 
neighbour, of the one ewe lamb whom he had 
nourished and brought up, and which was to 
him as a daughter. “ As the Lord liveth,” said 
David, “ the man that hath done this is worthy 
to die.” And Nathan said to David, “ Thou 
art the man.” And beneath that terrible re- 

[ 63 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


buke David saw his sin in all its shame and 
horror and humbled himself before God. He 
made his couch wet with tears and ate his bread 
with the bitter herbs of penitence and sorrow. 
And God’s purpose in sending Nathan to stab 
his conscience wide-awake, and in allowing do¬ 
mestic grief to break his heart, was to restore 
his soul, to restore it to faith and honour and 
purity. Penitence, humiliation, grief,—these 
were the “ green pastures ” in which God made 
David lie down. 

They did not look like “ green pastures.” 
They seemed harsh, ugly, forbidding places. 
David would never have chosen them for his 
resting-place. He would never have guessed 
that any refreshing could have been derived 
from them. God made him lie down in these 
things. He fed him with the bread of tears. 
He gave him the bread of adversity and the 
water of affliction. You notice these phrases, 
the “ bread of tears ”—tears can be: bread to 
the soul, tears may be “ green pastures.” The 
“ water of affliction ”—affliction can be refresh- 


[ 64 ] 




RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


ing to the soul, affliction may be “ waters of 
rest.” This was the nutriment God gave 
David's sick and leprous soul. He gave him 
the bread of tears, He gave him the water of 
affliction. By penitence and humiliation and 
grief He purged David of his sin and brought 
him back to moral health. He made him to 
lie down in the “ green pastures ” of sorrow 
and repentance. He led him beside the still 
waters of affliction, and so He restored his 
soul, his sick and almost dying soul. This is 
a bit of personal experience and I detect in it 
the throb and thrill of a gratitude that he never 
forgot. “He restoreth my soul.” David 
would have been a castaway, a moral derelict, 
a lost soul; he would have made his bed in hell 
but for the tender care and grace and wisdom 
and power of God. It was the Shepherd who 
saved this perishing sheep by bringing him to 
the green pastures and the still waters. He 
fed him with the bread of tears and gave him 
the water of affliction and so he restored his 
soul. 


[ 65 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


GOD THIS RESTORER 

“ He restoreth my soul.” Does language, 
can language convey to men a more heartening 
assurance than this? There the assertion 
stands, without qualification or exception of 
any kind, majestic in its simplicity. “ He re¬ 
storeth the soul.” Not “ some souls,” but “ the 
soul ”; the soul wherever it is found, and that 
means your soul and my soul and every soul. 
“ He restoreth the soul.” He restores it! 
Doctors will sometimes tell their patients that 
they can relieve their sickness but cannot en¬ 
tirely cure it. There is no such reservation 
about this promise. No matter what the con¬ 
dition of the soul may be, God can restore it. 
He can not only minimize the mischief, He can 
restore the soul to perfect soundness and health. 
You remember Jeremiah’s great proclamation 
to Israel—to an Israel tempted to think that its 
hurt was beyond healing and its pain incur¬ 
able? This is what he had to say in God’s 
name to that sinful people: “ I will restore 
health unto thee and I will heal thee of thy 

[ 66 ] 




RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


wounds/’ saith the Lord. Jeremiah was only 
applying to a special and particular case the 
assertion of my text, “ He restoreth my soul.” 

My soul! And my soul is the real me. It 
is the eternal part of me. Man has a body, but 
he is a soul. That is what the old Book says 
about him. “ God breathed into his nostrils the 
breath of life; and man became a living soul.” 
It is that soul, that heavenly spark, that Divine 
breath in him that makes him man. And it 
profits a man nothing if he gain the world and 
lose his soul. Now the very phrase, “ He re¬ 
storeth the soul,” suggests that the soul may fall 
sick, that it may be smitten with disease, that it 
may be in danger of death. And the suggestion 
of the text is borne out by the actual experience 
of life. The world is full of sick souls, diseased 
souls, leprous souls, perishing souls. John, in 
his letter to Gaius, expresses the prayer that he 
may prosper and be in health even as his soul 
prospereth. If the measure of our soul health 
were also the measure of our physical health 
we should be a world of invalids. For most of 

[ 67 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


us are sick souls, feeble, weak and fainting. 
And some are sick souls in the sense of being 
diseased, mortally stricken. Indeed, our world 
would be a pretty hopeless world but for the 
assurance of such a phrase as this—“ He re- 
storeth the soul.” And this assurance is not 
an empty phrase. It is an assurance ratified by 
incontestable facts. God has been restoring 
souls all down the ages. God came into this 
world in the person of Jesus, And that was 
the work to which Jesus gave Himself, the 
work of restoring souls. “ The spirit of the 
Lord is upon me,” He said at Nazareth, “ be¬ 
cause He hath anointed me to preach good tid¬ 
ings to the poor; He hath sent me to proclaim 
release to the captives, and recovery of sight 
to the blind, to set at liberty them that are 
bruised.” You notice the words “ release,” 
“ recovery,” to “ set at liberty ”—they all sug¬ 
gest aspects of “ restoring ” work. “ The Son 
of Man,” He said on another occasion, “ is 
come to seek and to save that which was lost.” 
To “ seek and to save ”—Jesus came to “ re- 

[ 68 ] 




RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


store,” and He did restore. He restored many 
a person to physical health. He cleansed the 
leper. He gave sight to the blind, and hearing 
to the deaf, and power to the paralyzed, and 
life to the dead. 

But His mightiest restoring ministry was 
His restoration of souls. Here, for instance, 
was a woman in one of the northern towns in 
whose soul all nobler and purer instincts had 
been drowned and submerged in sensual pleas¬ 
ures, a woman whose soul was all leprous with 
lust, a woman who was a sinner in the city, 
and Jesus somehow brought His love and grace 
to bear upon that sin-stained creature until all 
the love of sinful pleasure was purged out of 
her heart and her one passionate longing was 
to become clean and pure again. “ He re¬ 
stored her soul.” And here in Jericho was a 
man who was a chief tax-gatherer, and who 
had allowed greed so to engross his heart that 
he cheated and swindled and thieved and 
ground the faces of the poor without compunc¬ 
tion or mercy. But Jesus came into the man’s 

[69J 




THE KING OF LOVE 


house and brought His love and grace to bear 
upon him and at the touch of Jesus the greed 
and the hardness of Zacchaeus’ heart disap¬ 
peared, and pity and mercy and kindness and 
truth began to stir there once again. He “ re¬ 
stored his soul.” And here in Jerusalem was 
another man, a prominent and famous man. a 
religious leader, but who had allowed pride and 
prejudice and religious bigotry to make his 
heart as hard as a nether millstone, so that in 
persecuting Christ’s people he thought he was 
doing God service, but as he travelled to Da¬ 
mascus Christ met with him and the result of 
that meeting was that Saul got a new heart 
and the persecutor became a Gospel preacher. 
Christ “ restored his soul.” 

David is not the only one who gives this 
testimony. There is a multitude which no man 
can number out of every nation and kindred 
and tongue, who have washed their robes and 
made them white in the blood of the Lamb, 
every one of whom bears the same testimony, 
“ He restoreth my soul.” There is no disease 

[ 70 ] 




RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


of the soul that He has not been able to cure. 
No sickness of the soul which He has not been 
able to heal. Do you remember that passage 
in one of his letters to the Corinthians in which 
Paul gives a list of lost souls, people who can¬ 
not inherit the Kingdom of God? It is a ter¬ 
rible list. I wonder if I dare read it? “ Neither 
fornicators, nor adulterers, nor idolaters, nor 
effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with 
men, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, 
nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the 
Kingdom of God.” “ And such,” he adds with 
terrible bluntness, “ were some of you.” Some 
of these very people to whom he was writing 
had been amongst the diseased, defiled and 
mortally stricken souls of that sort. But some¬ 
thing wonderful, something almost incredible, 
had happened to them. “ But ye were washed, 
but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in 
the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the 
Spirit of our God.” These sunken, degraded, 
perishing people had been restored to moral 
health by the power of Christ. He had “ re- 

[ 71 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


stored ” their souls. To the cleansing and 
curative power of a physician who can accom¬ 
plish such miracles as these, no task of healing 
is impossible. His blood can make the foulest 
clean. He can wash white the most defiled and 
polluted soul. And in the soul that has wal¬ 
lowed in the very mire of sin, He can cause 
purity and truth and love to grow and flourish. 
He can restore the soul to what it was meant 
to be. He can give it joy and peace and 
abounding health. 

“ He restoreth my soul,” says the Psalmist. 
The restoring power of God was more to him 
than a general truth, it was an individual ex¬ 
perience. “ My soul ” ! In a sense all Christ’s 
cleansing and saving power avails us nothing 
until we put ourselves into His hands. It will 
profit us nothing to read about His miracles of 
healing grace unless we let Him exercise that 
grace upon us. We know nothing of the joy 
of salvation until we can say, not “ He restor¬ 
eth the soul,” but “ He restoreth my soul.” 
But if we come to Him as we are, poor, 

[ 72 ] 




RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


wretched, and blind, we shall get from Him 
“ sight, riches, healing of the mind,” and then 
we shall be able to say exultingly, triumphantly 
with the Psalmist in the text, “ He restoreth 
my soul.” 


the: convenient eood 

God is the great Restorer, and there is no 
soul in the world beyond His restoring power. 
But perhaps it was not that wide interpretation 
of God’s power that was mainly in the Psalm¬ 
ist’s mind. The figure before him is that of 
the shepherd and his flock. It is the fainting 
and wearied sheep of his own flock the shep¬ 
herd “ restores.” And possibly the thought 
that was primary in the Psalmist’s mind was 
that of God’s ability to restore those of His 
own people who had fainted and grown weary. 
That was the case with David himself. His 
shameful fall was the fall of one who knew 
God and professed to serve Him. But God in 
His infinite mercy did not cast him away for 
his sin—He “ restored ” him. In later days 

[ 73 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


Peter denied his Lord with oaths and curses in 
the judgment hall. Jesus did not wash His 
hands of His weak and treacherous disciple. 
With exquisite patience and love, He strength¬ 
ened his faith and made him equal to the great 
tasks of Apostleship—He “ restored ” him. 
And God’s people still falter and fail. They 
grow weary, fainting in their souls. They lose 
their first love. Their early enthusiasm dies 
down. “ Where is the blessedness I knew when 
first I saw the Lord?” It is the cry of one 
whose soul had somehow lost tone and vigour 
and health. But God “ restores ” the soul. 
He can strengthen the faint and weary. He 
can revive drooping energies. He can bring 
back the glow and ardour of the first devotion. 
There are many things that affect the health of 
the soul. But the suggestion of my text is 
that the soul is “ restored ” by being provided 
with the proper food. “ He maketh me to lie 
down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside 
the still waters, he restoreth my soul.” It is 
the green pastures and the still waters that ac- 

[ 74 ] 





RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


count for the restoration. Our souls are like 
our bodies in this respect, that their health de¬ 
pends upon convenient food. 

I have been reading lately Sir Ernest 
Shackleton’s South, and one of the most poig¬ 
nant narratives in the book is the story of the 
party who went depot-laying from the Aurora. 
They did fairly well on the outward journey. 
But on the homeward march they almost suf¬ 
fered the fate that befell Captain Scott. Of the 
six men who made the party three were ill and 
had to be carried on sledges. The other three 
would not have minded that had they them¬ 
selves been strong. Indeed they did not mind 
it, weak though they were. But it was terrible 
work. For sometimes they were so reduced for 
food that all they could have for breakfast was 
a cup of tea and half a biscuit, and for lunch 
a half-cup of weak tea and quarter of a biscuit, 
while the poor dogs were left together for days 
without any food at all. And then, weak as 
they were, they suffered from frost-bite, and 
finally scurvy attacked them. It became a 

[ 75 ] 




THE KING OP LOVE 


grim fight for life, for their own lives and for 
the lives of their helpless comrades on the 
sledges. And there is one cry that rings 
through the various notes in the leader’s diary, 
it is the cry for food, and a food of the right 
kind. Here is a sample entry: “ Hayward is 
getting worse, and one does not know who is 
the next. No mistake, it is scurvy, and the 
only possible cure is fresh food! ” Here is 
another: “ Hayward and Skipper going ahead 
on sticks at a very slow pace. I wonder what 
will be the outcome of it all. If one could only 
get some fresh food! ” Nothing else the leader 
knew would set right the blackened, swollen, 
scurvy-stricken bodies of his comrades. 

And the soul needs convenient food if it is 
to be kept in health. The reason why so many 
of our souls are feeble and sickly is that we are 
trying to feed them with unsuitable food. We 
try to satisfy them with mere things. You re¬ 
member what the rich man said to his soul: 
“ Soul,” he said, “ thou hast much goods laid 
up for many years; eat, drink, be merry.” He 

[ 76 ] 





RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


imagined he could feed his soul with “ goods.” 
And many—judging by their practice—believe 
the same thing. They make “ goods ” their 
aim. They seem to think they can be happy 
and content if they have “ goods ” in plenty. 
Even people who are nominally Christian seem 
more concerned about “ goods ” than they are 
about anything else. But you cannot feed the 
soul with “ goods.” You cannot satisfy the 
soul with things. That is a striking and sug¬ 
gestive word in which our Lord, describing 
those represented by the seed which fell into 
the thorny ground, said that they were men and 
women whose spiritual life, whose souls, were 
choked with cares and riches and pleasures of 
this life. The soul is not nourished by these 
things, it is simply “ choked ” by them, starved 
by them, debilitated by them. It is exactly in 
the same condition as the bodies of those Ant¬ 
arctic explorers were, who were frost bitten, 
blackened with scurvy and at the extremity of 
weakness for lack of fresh food. And all this 
is matter of experience. We can see the grow- 

[ 77 ] 





THE KING OE LOVE 


ing enfeeblement and impoverishment of the 
souls of those whose devotion is given to the 
riches and pleasures of this life. And the rea¬ 
son for this is quite obvious. God has put 
eternity in the heart of man. The soul of man 
is athirst for God, for the living God. You 
cannot nourish the eternal soul on “ goods.” 
Man cannot live by bread alone. The soul 
needs God. Jesus Christ is the soul’s food. It 
is by communion with Him, by sharing His 
life, that it is truly and properly fed. It is in 
Christ we find the “ green pastures,” and 
the “ still waters ” which refresh and revive 
and enlarge the soul. “ I am the Bread of 
life.” “ He that drinketh of the water which 
I shall give him shall never thirst.” And that 
is how God “ restores the soul,” brings it back 
to vigour and health again, by leading it to the 
green pastures and still waters to be found in 
Christ. 


PATHS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 


“ He restoreth my soul. ... He guideth me 

[ 78 ] 




RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


in the paths of righteousness for his name’s 
sake.” After the restoring comes the guiding. 
After the rest comes further effort. The shep¬ 
herd took the sheep down into the green pas¬ 
tures and the still waters to refresh them in the 
time of fierce and sultry heat, but the green 
pastures and the still waters were not to be their 

permanent abode. He led them there to restore 

* 

their energies and to renew their strength, in 
order that they might be fit to follow him when 
he guided them along straight paths either to 
their fold or to some further pasturage. And 
God brings to us in Christ the bread of life and 
the water of life in order to “ restore our 
souls,” so that then He may be able to guide us 
into “ paths of righteousness,” into ways of 
service and duty. We come to Christ to have 
our souls nourished and fed, and then He 
sends us out onto the road again—the hot and 
dusty road—going His errands and accomplish¬ 
ing His work. The Good Shepherd had to 
“ restore ” us before He could guide us into 
paths of righteousness. Until we were so 

[ 79 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


“ restored ” we should have no strength to 
follow. 

Let me go back to my Antarctic illustration 
again. At a certain point the leader resolved he 
would leave the sick behind with one man to 
care for them, while he and two others made a 
dash for a depot thirty miles away, where food 
was stored. Until they were properly fed it 
was hopeless to expect the sick men to make the 
rest of the journey. So back and fore they 
went, bringing ample rations with them and 
having first restored the strength of their sick 
comrades they were able to bring them in safety 
to the depot which was to be their winter’s 
home. First the restoration, then the straight 
path home. And it is very much the same with 
Christ and the soul. We could not follow 
along the paths of righteousness—the narrow 
way of life and duty—before we were “ re¬ 
stored,” strengthened with might in our souls. 
But once we are “ restored,” He guides us into 
paths of righteousness. Refreshment is meant 
to issue in effort. “ He called twelve,” it is 

[ 80 ] 



RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


written in the Gospel, “ that they might be with 
Him.” During these months and years of 
happy companionship the disciples were in 
green pastures and by still waters, and their 
souls were verily being “ restored.” But 
“ restoration ” was meant to lead to service. 
“ He called twelve that they might be with 
Him and that He might send them forth.” 
When renewed and restored, He meant to lead 
these men out along paths of duty and service 
and sacrifice and martyrdom. When on the 
holy mount Peter and James and John saw 
their Lord transfigured, the three disciples were 
verily in the green pastures and by the still 
waters. They were privileged and favoured 
men, and by the experience their souls were 
confirmed and strengthened and inspired. 
“ Master,” cried Peter, “ it is good for us to 
be here; let us make three tabernacles, one for 
Thee and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” 
But the “ restoration ” was meant to lead to 
effort, and so in the morning Jesus led them 
down again to the plain at the foot, where there 

[ 81 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


was urgent work to be done and devil-ridden 
sufferers to be healed. “ He restoreth my soul, 
He guideth me in the paths of righteousness.” 

Or to look at it from a slightly varying point 
of view, the recovery of the soul is meant to 
issue in a life of obedience and discipleship. 
Conversion is not the end, it is the beginning. 
Zacchaeus’ soul was restored when Jesus en¬ 
tered his home. But the little man after that 
experience began to realize that Christ was 
leading him along a certain path—it was a 
steep and difficult path—the path of righteous¬ 
ness, but he followed. “ Lord,” he said, “ the 
half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I 
have taken anything from any one by false 
accusation, I restore four fold.” None but the 
“ restored soul ” can tread that high and ardu¬ 
ous way, but when the Shepherd has “ re¬ 
stored ” our souls it is along that high and 
arduous way He guides us. And the proof 
that our souls are “ restored ” is that we 
bravely tread that steep and perilous “ path of 
righteousness.” In other words, a holy life is 

[ 82 ] 




RESTORATION AND GUIDANCE 


the evidence of a changed heart. “ He guideth 
me in the paths of righteousness.” The Shep 1 - 
herd does not drive; He guides. “ When He 
hath put forth all his own he goeth before 
them and the sheep follow Him.” If He 
guides us along steep and rugged ways, at any 
rate we have the comfort of knowing He is in 
front. He never says to His people “ Go.” It 
is always “ Come.” It is easy to follow when 
we hear His voice. And if we follow along 
that path of righteousness which He so bravely 
trod and along which He leads, it will bring us 
where it brought Him, even though it is 
through Gethsemanes and Calvarys, to the city 
which hath the foundations, to the throne and 
the crown and the very Presence of God. 


[ 83 ] 







THE VALLEY 


My Shepherd’s mighty aid, 

His dear, redeeming love, 

His all-protecting power displayed, 

I joy to prove: 

Led onward by my Guide 
I view the verdant scene, 

Where limpid waters gently glide 
Through pastures green. 

In error’s maze my soul 

Shall wander now no more; 

His Spirit shall, with sweet control, 
The lost restore; 

My willing steps shall lead 
In paths of righteousness; 

His power defend; His bounty feed 
His mercy bless. 

Affliction’s deepest gloom 

Shall but His love display; 

He will the vale of death illume 
With living ray: 

My failing flesh His rod 
Shall thankfully adore; 

My heart shall vindicate my God 
For evermore. 

His goodness ever nigh, 

His mercy ever free, 

Shall, while I live, shall when I die, 
Still follow me; 

For ever shall my soul 

His boundless blessings prove; 

And while eternal ages roll 
Adore and love. 

—Thomas Roberts. 


IV 


THE VALLEY 

“ Yea, though I walk through the valley of the 
shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art 
with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.” 

I must crave indulgence while I do again, in 
this chapter, what I have already done once 
before—go back to the verse which I was 
supposed to have dealt with in the previous 
chapter, before I pass on to the verse which is 
to be the special subject of our present study. 
I found so much to say about that first clause 
in verse three, “ He restoreth my soul,” that I 
left myself no time to do anything like justice 
to the second clause, “ He guideth me in the 
paths of righteousness,” while about the third 
clause, “ for His name’s sake,” I was able to 
say nothing at all. So I want to be allowed to 
return to verse three for a moment or two and 
say just a few things which properly belong to 
the last chapter. 


[ 87 ] 


THE KING OF LOVE 


“ He guideth me in the paths of righteous¬ 
ness,” the Psalmist says, and some commen¬ 
tators are inclined to say that “ paths of right¬ 
eousness ” mean simply “ straight paths.” Now 
it is quite true that this meaning is included in 
the phrase. I f we allow the Good Shepherd to 
guide us, He will lead us along “ straight 
paths,” paths which will bring us safely to the 
home and haven of our souls. It is not always 
easy to pick out the right road as we journey 
through life. We come now and again to cross¬ 
roads, and what is more dangerous still, to 
roads that seem to run side by side, and it is 
quite easy, as Christian and his companion dis¬ 
covered, to get astray from the right road. 
Life with its alternatives and its choices and 
its competing claims is often extraordinary 
puzzling. One of the Psalmists gives expres¬ 
sion to the bewilderment of his soul in that 
pathetic little cry, “ Make Thy way plain before 
my face.” He was quite sure God had a way 
for him, and he was quite sure that way was 
the right way, but his difficulty was to make 

[ 88 ] 




THE VALLEY 


out which of several ways was really God’s 
way. “ Make Thy way plain,” he prays, “ be¬ 
fore my face.” And one of the great services 
which Messiah was to render to mankind, one 
of the great blessings which was to accompany 
His coming, was this. “ He shall make the 
crooked places straight.” The path a man 
ought to take was to be made unmistakable for 
him. And that has been done for us by Jesus 
Christ. 

We are no longer in any difficulty about the 
road. He has made it plain before our face. 
For He has left marks upon it. When those 
Antarctic adventurers, to whom, I have pre¬ 
viously referred, were pushing their way into 
the bitter, frozen South at intervals they built 
cairns of ice and snow, and sometimes stuck a 
bit of black cloth upon them, that they might 
be able to trace their way back again. And the 
path of life has been marked for you and me so 
that we may not lose our way. Only the signs 
on it are not black, but red, like those great 
red splashes that mark the road over Mount 

[ 89 ] 






THE KING OF LOVE 


3 


Tiflis down to Engleberg. For there are foot¬ 
prints on it, “ bearing trace of having bled.” 
They are the footprints of Him who was crim¬ 
son in His apparel and who came with dyed 
garments from Bozrah. They are the foot¬ 
prints of the Good Shepherd Himself. There 
is no mistaking the road. If we walk in the 
track of these footprints they will bring us by 
the right way to the city which hath the foun¬ 
dations whose builder and maker is God. 

But while the idea of “ straight paths ” is 
certainly in the phrase, I do not think it can be 
limited to that geographical meaning. It has a 
moral significance as well. For men, as Dr. 
Maclaren says, straight paths must needs be 
“ paths of righteousness.” Indeed that very 
word “ straight,” in our common use of it, 
when we apply it to men, carries with it a 
moral signification. When we speak of a man 
as “ straight,” we mean that he walks in “ paths 
of righteousness.” And that is what the Shep¬ 
herd does with the “ restored soul.” He leads 
him into ways of holy living. When Christ 

[ 90 ] 




THE VALLEY 


has won a man’s heart, He bids him follow 
Him. “ Come ye after me,” He says, and it is 
along these high paths of obedient, pure, sacri¬ 
ficial living that He leads him. I do not want 
to read too much into the word “ righteous¬ 
ness.” I do not, for instance, want to read 
Paul’s meaning into it. Righteousness, in the 
characteristically Pauline use of the word, 
means setting a guilty sinner right with God, 
making a sinful man righteous in the eyes of 
God. It is only Christ who can guide into that 
path of righteousness. It is only through Him 
we get pardon and reconciliation. But these 
ideas are not in the Psalmist’s mind. He is 
thinking of “ righteousness ” in the sense of 
right doing and holy living. When Christ re¬ 
stores the soul, He leads it into new and loftier 
ways of life. To the man who has been born 
again by the proclamation of the Christian Gos¬ 
pel, Christ presents the demand of the Chris¬ 
tian ethic. You have noticed how largely the 
Epistles are taken up with instructions as to 
the moral demands of the Christian life, plain 

[ 91 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


and homely directions as to conduct ? That is 
just a commentary on the statement of this 
verse. When Jesus “ restores a soul,” He does 
not allow that soul to go on in the old selfish, 
sensual ways. He guides it into paths of right¬ 
eousness. After He had restored the soul of 
Onesimus, for instance, He gave his life a new 
set and direction. He made him honest, faith¬ 
ful, willing, reliable. He guided him into paths 
of righteousness. And so He does for us all. 
If any man is in Christ he is a new creature. 
Conversion issues in a new life. When Christ 
restores a man’s soul He then guides him into 
paths of righteousness. 

FOR His name's SAKE 

What an immensity of pains Christ takes 
with and for His sheep! What an infinitude of 
tender care all this represents! The Shepherd 
—and it makes very little difference whether 
you think of the Shepherd as God or as Christ 
—according to the Psalmist’s jubilant confes¬ 
sion, makes him to lie down in green pastures, 

[ 92 ] 




THE VALLEY 


leads him beside the still waters, restores his 
soul, and leads him into paths of righteousness. 
And why does God do all this ? Why does He 
take all this trouble and care? Why this un¬ 
ceasing exercise of tenderness and love? He 
does it all, the Psalmist says, “ for His name's 
sake,” for the sake of His own character. “ He 
does it,” says Bishop Perowne, “ not for our 
deserving, but out of His own goodness, for 
the manifestation of His own glory and the 
furtherance of His Kingdom upon earth.” 
“ God does many things for His name’s sake,” 
says Dr. Davison, “ that He may be true to 
His own character, for He cannot deny Him¬ 
self.” It is not because the sheep are precious 
and valuable (though no doubt they are all 
that) that the Shepherd takes all this care of 
them, but because His own Shepherd instincts 
constrain Him to do it. It is not because we are 
precious in His sight (though He condescends 
to count us such) that God takes the trouble to 
feed and sustain and restore and guide us, but 
just because He is what He is—a God of in- 

[ 93 ] 




THE KING OP LOVE 


finite compassion and tender love. He does it 
“ for His name’s sake.” 

It was for “ His name’s sake ” that He sent 
His only Son into the world to live and die for 
our salvation. It was not for our sake He did 
it. There was nothing in us to arouse a love 
like that. We had rebelled against Him; we 
were sin-stained and unclean. We were alien¬ 
ated from God by our wicked works. If it had 
depended on our desert, there never would have 
been an Incarnation or an Atonement. The 
impulse to the redeeming mission of the Son 
came from the Father’s love. “ God so loved 
the world that He gave His only begotten 
Son.” It was to satisfy the yearning of God’s 
heart that Jesus came. The Gospel originates 
not in the fact that men wanted God, but that 
God wanted men. It was “ for His own 
name’s sake ” that God sent His Son. 

It is “ for His name’s sake ” that God for¬ 
gives us and receives us into His household. It 
is not for our sakes. There is nothing in us to 
merit mercy and favour like this. For we are 

[ 94 ] 




THE VALLEY 


wayward, perverse and disobedient children. 
We do not deserve mercy. We are not worthy 
to be called His children. It is “ for His own 
name’s sake ” that He forgives us and receives 
us and gives us the kiss of welcome—just be¬ 
cause He is the Lord, full of compassion and 
gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy 
and truth. 

And if at last we attain to the mansions of 
the blest, it will not be for our own sakes, be¬ 
cause we are so good and holy that we deserve 
admission; it will be again “for His name’s 
sake.” It will be all of grace, not of merit, it 
will be because His wonderful love opens the 
door to us, though unworthy. 

And I am glad that it is for “ His name’s 
sake ” God does all these things. I am glad 
that it is “ for His name’s sake ” He supports 
and sustains and restores and guides us. God’s 
character is an infinitely surer thing to rely 
upon than our own. It is to that character of 
God the saints of all ages have appealed; it is 
in it they have trusted and on it they have 

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THE KING OF LOVE 


quietly rested. For instance, if they have cried 
for the pardon of their sins, it has been “ for 
His name’s sake.” “ For Thy name’s sake 
pardon mine iniquity, for it is great.” If they 
have wanted tender and gentle dealing it is for 
God’s name’s sake they have dared to ask for 
it, not because they deserved it. “ Deal Thou 
with me, for Thy name’s sake.” Men have 
known—and the best men have been the most 
vividly aware of this—that they had no claim 
by their own merit or desert on the favour and 
love of God. In strict justice not one of us 
should see salvation. Their hope has been not 
in themselves, but in God; not in what they 
are, but in what He is ; not in works, but in 
faith; not in merit, but in grace. 

Here is the true anchor of the soul. Here 
is the sure ground of confidence, the spring of 
triumphant assurance. God’s mercy and love 
and care are forthcoming for His name's sake. 
God has to live up to His own character. I 
confess to you, my brethren, if mercy and love 
and care were contingent on a certain character 

[ 96 ] 



THE VALLEY 


of my own, I should despair. If, for instance, 
my acceptance with God depended on a certain 
holiness of my own, I should abandon hope. 
It is only a morally obtuse braggart like Rous¬ 
seau who, with the record of his life in his 
hands, would talk about claiming acquittal at 
the bar of God as a matter of right. Our own 
hearts condemn us. We know quite well that 
our lives are full of evil. No, there is no ac¬ 
ceptance for me because of what I am, but I 
humbly believe that I shall be accepted because 
of what God is, because His is a love that for¬ 
gives to the very uttermost. If, again, my 
walking in straight paths depended on myself, 
on my resolution and strength of will, I should 
despair. For I know myself fickle, inconstant, 
changeable. One day I walk firmly in the nar¬ 
row way; another I love to choose my own 
path. One day my devotion is warm, another 
it is cold and dead. If it depended on myself 
I should be more than doubtful of ever reach¬ 
ing the City which hath foundations. But 
when I remember God, I have my hopes that I 

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THE KING OF LOVE 


shall be privileged to see that city whose streets 
are gold, whose walls are jasper and whose sea 
is glass. For God is constant and unchanging, 
and He has charged Himself with my care. 
There is no fickleness about God. He is no 
creature of moods. His love never grows cold. 
His care never falters. We may become faith¬ 
less, but He abideth faithful. We may forget 
Him, but He never forgets us. Our hold of 
Him may relax, but never His hold of us. He 
will never leave us nor forsake us until He has 
accomplished that which concerneth us. And 
that, I repeat, is our confidence that there will 
always be mercy and acceptance and guidance 
and keeping grace for us. God, as the Apostle 
says, cannot deny Himself. He must act in 
accord with His character, and His character is 
one of redeeming and sacrificial love. Because 
God is what He is, if we will commit ourselves 
to Him, He will forgive and guide and keep 
and save. “ He maketh me to lie down in 
green pastures, He leadeth me beside the still 
waters; He restoreth my soul; He guideth me 

[ 98 ] 




THE VALLEY 


in the paths of righteousness, for His name's 
sake” 


THE VAIvEEY OE GEOOM 

Now the next verse, as it seems to me, con¬ 
nects itself quite closely with the concluding 
clause of verse three. It could never have been 
penned but for the thoughts of God’s love and 
unfailing care suggested by that little phrase, 
“ for His name’s sake.” This verse four 
brings us to the climax of the Psalmist’s confi¬ 
dence. It is a great outburst of triumph. It 
reminds me of that thrilling shout of victory 
which St. Paul raises in the great resurrection 
chapter in his first letter to the Corinthians 
when, facing the last enemy, he cries, “ O 
death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is 
thy victory ? Thanks be to God, which giveth 
us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 
There is not, perhaps, the same exuberance in 
what the Psalmist says here—that could 
scarcely be expected, seeing that he did not live 
in the light of the resurrection of Christ. The 

[ 99 ] 


> 

> 

> 


> 

> 


) > > 




THE KING OF LOVE 


tone of this verse is not, perhaps, one of ex¬ 
uberant triumph; it is rather one of serene and 
quiet confidence. And it is the thought of 
God’s nature and character that has inspired it. 
“ Yea, though I walk through the valley of the 
shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou 
art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they com¬ 
fort me.” It is distasteful to me to have to 
suggest that a translation which has by long 
use become familiar and dear to us, does not 
quite accurately reproduce the Psalmist’s 
thought. But you will notice that in the Re¬ 
vised Version margin, the alternative rendering 
is suggested, “ the valley of deep darkness.” 
There is no doubt at all that that is the more 
accurate translation. The rendering “ valley of 
the shadow of death,” unduly narrows and lim¬ 
its the phrase. Death is not the only “ valley 
of gloom ” into which we are led as we pass 
through life. It may be the gloomiest—though 
I have my doubts on that point. But there are 
certainly other valleys of gloom, as, for in¬ 
stance, sickness and loss of friends and business 

[ 100 ] 



< < ( 




THE VALLEY 


anxiety. And what the Psalmist is saying here 
is not simply that he will not fear when death 
comes, but that he will not fear when he is 
called upon to enter any “ valley of deep 
gloom ” that may have to be traversed in the 
course of life’s journey. 

The picture is one of the shepherd leading 
his sheep through some dark and sunless ra¬ 
vine in the hills, and the sheep following quite 
unafraid, because of their confidence in the 
shepherd, who with his rod—his club or mace 
for defence against the attacks of wild beasts— 
hanging at his side and his staff, for the guid¬ 
ance and help of his sheep, actually in his hand 
made himself responsible for their safety. In 
exactly the same way the Psalmist declares that 
he will be afraid of no ravine of gloom through 
which he may be led, because he is absolutely 
sure of the guidance and protection of God. 
“ Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff 
they comfort me.” 

What a contrast in scenery there is between 
verse two and verse four. In verse two the 

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THE KING OF LOVE 


Psalmist talked of “ green pastures ” and 
“ waters of rest.” Here he talks of the “ ra¬ 
vine of deep gloom.” And how true this is to 
life. For life does bring us varied experiences 
of this sort. It does change—sometimes in an 
instant—from sunshine to storm, from blue 
skies to black, from glory to gloom, and from 
green pastures and still waters we find our¬ 
selves suddenly walking in some valley of deep 
darkness. David again here is setting down 
his own experience. He had passed through 
many a ravine of deep gloom—those days of 
exile and outlawry, for instance, when he was 
hunted by Saul; those days of his family trou¬ 
bles consequent upon his own sin and the sin 
of his sons; those terrible days of Absalom’s 
rebellion, when well nigh his whole kingdom 
fell away from him, and that worst of all days 
when the news was brought to him that his son 
Absalom was dead. And yet, looking back, he 
is conscious that in those “ ravines of gloom ” 
God was with him, caring for him and protect¬ 
ing—so whatever “ valley of deep darkness ” 

[ 102 ] 





THE VALLEY 


yet lay in front—and the valley of the shadow 
of death could not be very far off—he could 
face it without fear, confident that God would 
be with Him still, to keep and save. I say the 
contrasted scenes of these two verses are true 
to life. I do not withdraw what I said in a 
previous chapter about the preponderance in 
life being on the side of pleasure, not of pain. 
There is more of sunshine than of storm. If 
we struck a balance we should find that our 
days of quiet happiness outnumber our days of 
grief and sorrow. Life for the major part is 
an affair of green pastures and waters of rest. 
But it would be the foolishest and falsest of all 
affectations to pretend that life was nothing but 
sunshine and song—that it was nothing but 
smiles and gaiety. Trouble and sorrow and 
care and pain are very real things. No amount 
of pretending will get rid of them. And trouble 
and sorrow and care and pain come to us all at 

one time or another. Sooner or later we all 

/ 

find ourselves in the valley of deep gloom. 
Some of us—most of us, I suppose—at one 

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THE KING OF LOVE 


time or another have been in it. Some of you 
have had your times of sickness. It was a 
“ valley of deep gloom.” It was not simply 
the pain you yourself had to endure, but your 
concern for your loved ones; your anxiety for 
the wife and children dependent on you. And 
some of you have had your times of business 
anxiety. It was a “ ravine of deep gloom.” 
Many are in that “ ravine ” just now. A year 
ago business seemed flourishing and business 
men were in the green pastures. Today the 
world of business is rocking beneath their feet, 
and they do not know what is going to happen. 
They are in the valley of deep gloom. And 
some of you have had heavy and heart-breaking 
sorrows. Your nearest and best have been 
taken from you. You lost the light of your 
life, the desire of your eyes at a stroke. I met 
a close friend of mine the other day and he 
said to me, “ I want five minutes with you.” 
I said, “ All right. Come upstairs.” I sat 
down with him in a corner of the room. And 
there he broke down and in a series of little 

[ 104 ] 




THE VALLEY 


heart-broken gasps he told me that the doctors 
had passed sentence on his wife, and would I 
come to see her ? And somehow the day seemed 
to grow dark as I listened to him. I was with 
my friend in the “ ravine of deep gloom.” 

There is no need to amplify, is there ? These 
“ valleys of deep darkness ” have to be tra¬ 
versed by us all in the course of life’s pilgrim¬ 
age. But the assurance of my text is this: that 
we need not fear them—at least we need not 
fear that any evil will befall us. I do not sug¬ 
gest that sickness and care and sorrow are not 
fearful things;—they are. The Psalmist does 
not say that, facing them, he knew no- fear at 
all. What he does say is that the remembrance 
of God lifted him above his fear and made him 
quite sure that these fearful things could work 
him no harm. And that same assurance may 
be ours if we commit ourselves to the keeping 
care of God. Sickness and care and loss may, 
as a matter of fact, inflict terrible harm upon 
men. They have done harm to thousands, they 
have made them hard and sour and bitter and 

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THE KING OE LOVE 


cynical. But if we are in God’s keeping, we 
need fear no evil. These dread and terrible 
things will not be able to hurt us; they will be 
constrained to minister to our enrichment. You 
remember what the old Book says about wis¬ 
dom ? “ Her ways are ways of pleasantness 

and all her paths are peace.” And that is ex¬ 
actly what we shall say about God’s ways, when 
we look back, even though they led us through 
“ ravines of gloom.” His ways were ways of 
pleasantness and all His paths were peace. 

THE KEEPING PRESENCE 

The secert of the Psalmist’s confidence was 
the assurance of God’s Presence. “ Even 
though I walk through the valley of the shadow 
of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with 
me.” It was not due to any trust in himself, 
but to his faith in God’s keeping care. The 
antidote to fear, as one of the commentators 
puts it, is a Presence. Some trust to their own 
resolution and strength to see them safely 
through these “ ravines of gloom.” You re- 

[ 106 ] 




THE VALLEY 


member how Henley sings proudly, almost de¬ 
fiantly, “ I am the master of my fate, I am the 
captain of my soul.” But our own strength is a 
poor thing to rely on. I do not deny that there 
is something fine and admirable about the way 
in which some men will string themselves up 
to bear trial and trouble—all the stings and ar¬ 
rows of outrageous fortune—without whim¬ 
pering or whining. But not every one is a 
stoic. And I am not sure that the stoic temper, 
by begetting a certain hardness and callous¬ 
ness, does not itself do harm. No, the anti¬ 
dote to fear is a Presence. That is why we 
need fear no evil—from care or sickness or loss 
—because God will be with us; because His 
love will be about us; because His strength will 
be imparted to us, and strengthened by His 
power and comforted by His love we shall find 
that these harsh and unpleasant things have 
contributed to our moral and spiritual wealth. 

And when it comes to the last “ ravine ” of 
all we may preserve our happy confidence. I 
say again that I am not sure that it is the dark- 

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THE KING OF LOVE 


est of the ravines of gloom we have to traverse. 
It is significant that John Bunyan puts the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death quite early in 
Christian’s pilgrimage, as if to suggest that the 
worst peril does not come at the end. Nor 
does it, as I think. Death is not the dreadful 
thing we think it. “ There is no valley here,” 
said D. L. Moody. “ At evening time, it shall 
be light.” But most men dread it. And so 
this word is welcome to us with its calm assur¬ 
ance of faith. We need not fear that last 
ravine of gloom. It can work us no ill. For 
God will be with us. In death, as in life, we 
shall be in His safe protection and care. It is 
in God our trust is in death, as in life. Not in 
ourselves, but in Him. “ Neither death nor 
life shall be able to separate us from the love 
of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 
God is stronger than death. No! we need not 
fear. That last ravine of gloom is no cul de 
sac. Through it God leads to the land where 
there is no night, but sacred, high, eternal noon. 


[ 108 ] 



THE FULL TABLE 


My Shepherd shall supply my need, 

Jehovah is His Name; 

In pastures fresh He makes me feed, 

Beside the living stream. 

He brings my wandering spirit back, 

When I forsake His ways; 

And leads me, for His mercy’s sake, 

In paths of truth and grace. 

When I walk through the shades of death— 
His presence is my stay; 

A word of His supporting breath, 

Drives all my fears away. 

His hand, in sight of all my foes, 

Doth still my table spread; 

My cup with blessing overflows, 

His oil anoints my head. 

The sure provisions of my God 
Attend me, all my days; 

Oh, may His house be mine abode, 

And all my works be praise: 

There would I find a settled rest, 

While others go and come— 

No more a stranger, or a guest, 

But like a child at home. 


■Isaac Watts. 


V 


THE FULL TABLE 

“ Thou prsparest a table before me in the pres¬ 
ence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head 
with oil; my cup runneth over.” 

I do not think that any one can read this ex¬ 
quisite little Psalm with thought and atten¬ 
tion without being conscious of a slight 
break at this verse five, or if not of a “ break/’ 
of a change in atmosphere and colour and scen¬ 
ery. I am not suggesting that there is any 
change in the main theme. This little Psalm is 
a perfect unity, made such by the one note that 
throbs and thrills through it from the first sen¬ 
tence to the last—the note, viz., of a quiet and 
happy trust in God. Musicians, as my readers 
know, speak of the motif of a musical compo¬ 
sition. A musical motif is a short theme or 
phrase, which becomes the subject of endless 
variations and upon which, as a foundation, an 

[in] 


THE KING OF LOVE 


elaborate composition is built. But although 
the variations may be numerous, through them 
all the motif is continually to be heard, and it is 
the recurrence of that motif that gives unity 
and coherence to the whole. The motif, you 
may say, is the text upon which the rest of the 
music is but exposition and commentary. Now 
the motif, the theme, that goes singing through 
this Psalm is that of faith in the love and care 
of God. But at this verse five we come across 
a variation. Up to this point the Psalmist has 
illustrated the protecting care of God by means 
of the figure of a shepherd. At this point he 
substitutes for the shepherd the figure of a 
royal Host. The scenery changes from the 
open fields, the green pastures, the still waters, 
the dark gorges of the Bethlehem country, to 
the stately halls of some royal palace where the 
feast is spread. 

“ Thou preparest a table before me in the 
presence of mine enemies, thou anointest my 
head with oil, my cup runneth over.” I am 
quite aware that all commentators do not take 

[ 112 ] 




THE PULL TABLE 


this view. There are some who maintain that 
the figure is still that of the shepherd and his 
sheep. When dusk falls, the shepherd takes his 
sheep to the greenest and most luscious pas¬ 
tures so that they may sleep full fed. And 
though through the gathering darkness the 
shapes of slinking wolves may be seen gliding 
hither and thither, under the sufficient protec¬ 
tion of the shepherd the sheep eat in perfect 
safety. That interpretation may be made to fit 
in with the first sentence of the verse, but it 
seems almost impossible to interpret in any nat¬ 
ural fashion the two last clauses, “ thou anoint- 
est my head with oil, my cup* runneth over,” of 
a shepherd and his sheep. Those two clauses 
are redolent of the festal chamber. The pro¬ 
vision of fragrant anointing oil was insepar¬ 
ably associated with festal occasions in the 
East. You remember how our Lord charged 
Simon the Pharisee with discourtesy for ne¬ 
glecting to provide it; while the full cup was 
the proof and evidence of the bounty of the 
host’s hospitality. You remember again how 

[ 113 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


it was the fear of the reproach of niggardly 
hospitality, as evidenced by the empty cup, that 
led directly to our Lord’s first miracle at the 
wedding feast of Galilee. Altogether I do not 
hesitate to say that the figures of my text—the 
full table, the anointing oil, the mantling cup— 
interpreted naturally, suggest a feast—the 
bounteous provision of a royal Host—and 
nothing else. 

So, in my exposition, I am going to take it 
for granted that the Psalmist has at this point 
changed his illustration. In this verse he 
pictures God as a princely Host. It is a famil¬ 
iar enough figure in the Bible. It was a figure 
which Jesus adopted in one, if not in two, of 
His most beautiful parables. God is the great 
Host who makes a feast for the wedding of 
His Son, and to that feast He issues His invi¬ 
tations broadcast. So ample is His provision 
that He bids His servants call in the poor and 
the lame and the halt and the blind that His 
house may be filled. He is a Host of such 
abounding hospitality that there is “ enough 

[ 114 ] 




THE FULL TABLE 


for each, enough for all, enough for evermore.” 
And while the idea of God as a bountiful host 
is a familiar Bible idea, its introduction here 
in no way breaks up the unity and symmetry of 
this little Psalm. Dr. Davidson says that 
“ much is gained, even from the point of view 
of art, by this additional figure to describe 
God’s goodness and man’s ground of trust and 
confidence. But whether the change of figure 
enriches the little Psalm or not, at any rate, it in 
no way impairs its unity. For the thought is 
unchanged. David’s spirit of trust in God per¬ 
vades the whole Psalm. Mr. Stopford Brooke 
says: “ It enters into all its ideas and images. 
It is this which harmonizes all its contrasts, 
mellows all its changes, and unites into one 
whole the quiet contemplation of the first 
verses, the gloom of the fourth, the triumph of 
the fifth and the combined retrospect and 
prophecy of the last.” 

“ Thou preparest a table before me in the 
presence of mine enemies.” I rather fancy that 
we have here again a page from David’s per- 

[ 115 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


sonal history. This is not to be written down 
as a bit of imagination or fancy, but it is just a 
transcript of the writer’s own experience. 
There is a large element of autobiography in 
this little Psalm and there is autobiography in 
this sentence. David had spent a large portion 
of his life in the presence of his enemies. In 
the early years when he was a fugitive from 
the wrath of Saul he went in hourly danger of 
his life. And yet, looking back, he could see 
that God always “ provided a table ” for him. 
He had provided for the physical support of 
himself and his men—even though on occasion 
the holy bread had to be taken from off the 
altar in order to do it. And since he had been 
king, though wars had been so incessant that 
he had become a “ man of blood,” yet God had 
without lapse or failure provided for him and 
his people. He and they had lacked no good 
thing. And it was not of the provision of 
material food, physical support, that David 
thought merely. He had lived his life in pres¬ 
ence of foes more terrible and deadly than the 

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: s 


men who sought his life and his kingdom. He 
had lived in the presence of enemies who 
sought after his soul to destroy it. David was 
a man of like passions with ourselves; perhaps 
indeed a man of fiercer and more turbulent pas¬ 
sions than most of us. There were raging, 
tearing lusts in David’s soul, and there were 
fierce temptations that perpetually set those 
lusts of his on fire. The very position he occu¬ 
pied—as monarch whose will was law—lent 
added power to his foes and made the fight 
for his own soul the harder. And the fight 
often went against him. The record of his 
failure is here in this book. His soul was 
amongst the lions again and again. But he 
never fell finally into their power. When he 
cried to God, there was always strength forth¬ 
coming to bring him off more than conqueror. 
And when he fell, there was ever mercy to re¬ 
store him. God continually gave him the oil 
of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for 
the spirit of heaviness—so that, looking back 
and noting how God had furnished him with 

[ 117 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


mercy and grace, enough for every emergency, 
whether of struggle or of failure, he sets this 
iiown as his great and happy experience— 
“ Thou preparest a table before me in the pres¬ 
ence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head 
with oil, my cup runneth over.” 

Now the truth I want to emphasize is that 
David’s experience may be ours, too. God can 
do all this for us as well as for him. God does 
not change. His love does not falter and His 
power does not fail. If we are willing to com¬ 
mit ourselves to His keeping care, as did this 
Psalmist, our testimony, too, will be that He 
prepares a table before us in the presence of 
our enemies. The main ideas of the verse are 
those of provision for our needs and festive 
rejoicing. It may be that David had his 
physical needs in mind as he penned these 
words. And it is still true that in that respect 
God provides for us a full table. The yearly 
harvest is His gift. We sit down day by day 
to eat food of His providing. He gives us each 
day our daily bread. And with the memory of 

[ 118 ] 




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those days still fresh in our minds when Ger¬ 
many tried to cut off our food supplies, we can 
say humbly and gratefully in the words of the 
Psalmist, “ Thou preparest a table before me 
in the presence of mine enemies/’ And if you 
remind me at this point that large tracts of 
Europe are short of food, that something like 
starvation stalks through certain parts of 
Europe, that there is unemployment and conse¬ 
quent need here at home, I answer “Yes.” 
But the need and want and shortage are not be¬ 
cause of any failure on God’s part. The earth 
is there as rich and fruitful as ever it was, 
ready now as always to reward with bountiful 
harvests the industry of men, but if men per¬ 
sist in giving themselves to strife instead of to 
industry, and if by the ravages of war they 
turn into deserts what God meant to be fruit¬ 
ful fields, shortage and want are bound to en¬ 
sue. The fault is not God’s, it is ours. Let 
men turn their swords into ploughshares and 
their spears into pruning hooks; let them abjure 
war and give themselves to the pursuits of 

[ 119 ] 




THE KING OP LOVE 


peace, and there will be no shortage. A teem¬ 
ing earth will demonstrate anew that God pre¬ 
pares a table for us. But it is not God’s pro¬ 
vision for his physical need that is chiefly in 
the Psalmist’s mind, but Plis provision for the 
soul. And it is upon that provision I want to 
concentrate attention. 

OUR ENEMIES 

First of all, I want you to notice the picture 
of the moral situation which this verse gives 
us. We are “ in the presence of our enemies.” 
This is in accord with the teaching of the Bible 
from the first page to the last. Life, according 
to the Bible, is, from beginning to end, a con¬ 
flict; it is a fight from which there is no dis¬ 
charge. It is not a barrack-square parade ; it is 
a fierce campaign. Military figures abound in 
the Bible. And the military figures abound just 
because life is a struggle, a wrestle, a battle, 
an unending fight. I do not say that the fight 
continues equally hotly and fiercely at every 
stage. The battle ebbs and flows. Some fights 

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men definitely win and the particular foe- 
ceases to trouble them. There are men, for in¬ 
stance, who have won a decisive victory over 
the drink habit. But beaten in one particular 
section of the field, the foe may attack us in 
another. If a man comes scatheless out of the 
fight with the insurgent passions of youth, he 
may fall victim to the cares of the world and 
the deceitfulness of riches, which are the pe¬ 
culiar peril of middle age. Always the fight 
goes on. We are never allowed to put our 
swords into the scabbard. Ifife ends with a 
fight. The last enemy that must be faced and 
conquered is death. This is the moral situation 
in which we find ourselves, no matter what our 
age or condition. We are in presence of ene¬ 
mies—or as one well-known hymn puts it, 
“ We are in the midst of foes,” 

These foes are many and various. To begin 
with there are certain impulses and desires and 
passions in ourselves which have to be held in 
check or else they will sweep the soul into 
destruction and perdition. I am not going to 

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THE KING OF LOVE 


discuss how we came by it. I am content now 
with noting the fact that we are born with a 
certain taint in the blood, a certain bias toward 
evil. “ The flesh lusteth against the spirit,” 
says St. Paul. We know it. The pull of the 
flesh, the tug of the lower nature is tremendous. 
But we know, too, that to yield is to degrade 
and coarsen and defile life. But the fight 
against these appetites that clamour for ap¬ 
peasement means agony and bloody sweat. 
And then in addition to the weaknesses and 
passions of our own nature, we live in a world 
which is full of incitements to evil. Our own 
hearts contain the gunpowder, the world applies 
the match. Our own hearts harbour the desire, 
the world affords the opportunity. The world 
*—I mean the whole tone and temper and spirit 
of our present environment—is hostile to what 
is best and holiest. The world is enmity 
against God. This is not mere pulpit rhetoric. 
Everyone who takes life seriously and wants 
to live nobly knows that it means a constant 
fight to resist the pressure of the world in 

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which we live, for to surrender to the pressure 
would mean the sacrifice of the soul. The very 
things the world loves and most ardently seeks 
may be fatal to the higher life. The soul may 
not only be drowned in destruction and per¬ 
dition through youthful lusts; it may also be 
choked by the cares of the world and the deceit¬ 
fulness of riches. 

And then according to the testimony of this 
Old Book, in addition to the passions of our 
own nature, and the pressure of the world, we 
have to contend against a whole hierarchy of 
evil spirits. There is an organized kingdom 
of evil with its prince, who has subordinate evil 
spirits at his command. I know that the idea 
of evil spirits and a personal devil is scouted 
by a great many people as a pure superstition. 
But I see no more reason to doubt the existence 
of discarnate evil beings than I do to doubt the 
existence of angels; and there are facts in life, 
in the personal spiritual life of people which 
are hard to account for except on the supposi¬ 
tion that there are evil spirits ceaselessly busy 

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THE KING OP LOVE 


suggesting unholy thoughts and desires—lur¬ 
ing, tempting, goading men into sin. At any 
rate these evil spiritual forces were real enough 
to the New Testament writers. You remember 
Paul’s words, “ We wrestle not against flesh 
and blood, but against the principalities, against 
the powers, against the world rulers of this 
darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wicked¬ 
ness in the heavenly places.” That is the moral 
situation—“ We are in the midst of foes.” 

THE PREPARED TABLE 

, Now the joyful assurance of this verse is 
that in the very presence of these enemies of 
ours there is always the prepared table. In the 
midst of encompassing foes there is support 
and security. I like the realism and frankness 
of the Bible. There is no promise here that 
our foes shall vanish and disappear—the prom¬ 
ise is that such strength and support will be 
provided for us that we shall not need to fear 
them. I do not know that evil desire and pas¬ 
sion and appetite ever completely die out of 

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THE FULL TABLE 


the soul. They may perhaps get less turbulent 
and insurgent with the passage of the years. 
But they still remain. That was one of the 
things that never ceased to perplex John Bun- 
yan—the presence of sin in the regenerate. 
But though the evil emotions and desires re¬ 
main, if we are in the keeping of God they 
remain only to be checked and beaten down if 
they seek to assert themselves. Even in face of 
these domestic foes, God keeps us in security. 
He prepares our table for us in the presence of 
our enemies. So long as we live in the world 
we shall be exposed to the pressure of the 
world—to its temptations to barter eternal 
things for temporal things, and spiritual bless-' 
ing for material wealth. But though in the 
world we need not be of it, and though exposed 
to its temptation we need not yield to it; 
temptation need not develop into sin. In the 
keeping of God we are secure against its seduc¬ 
tions. He strengthens us to rise superior to 
all its blandishments. We may have the world 
beneath our feet. You remember how that as 

[ 125 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


Christian went on his way towards the Por¬ 
ter’s Lodge, he espied two lions on the road. 
At the sight of them he was for the moment 
terrified and half minded to turn back. But he 
plucked up heart and pressed forward, keeping 
to the middle of the road. And he found that 
the lions could not reach him. They roared at 
him but they could do him no harm, for they 
were chained. That is it exactly. The hostile 
evil world is still there. But if we are kept by 
God, it cannot hurt us. He supplies us with 
strength to rise above all its temptations. He 
provides a table before us, in the presence of 
our enemies. 

And what of those evil principalities and 
powers of which St. Paul speaks? Well, even 
against their attacks we are kept in security. 
We have sufficient grace imparted to us to put 
the world, the flesh and the devil beneath our 
feet. There is a tremendous contrast between 
the seventh and eighth chapters of St. Paul’s 
epistle to the Romans. In the seventh his soul 
is among the lions. You can hear the wild 

[ 126 ] 




THE FULL TABLE 


beasts snap and snarl. “ The good that I 
would, I do not; the evil that I would not, that 
I practise; wretched man that I am; who shall 
deliver me from this dead body.” But chapter 
eight breathes an atmosphere of serenity and 
joy. The enemies are still there, but he is no 
longer afraid of them. “ Neither life nor death 
nor principalities nor powers, nor height nor 
depth (all these spiritual foes of whom Paul 
stood in such dread) nor things present, nor 
things to come shall be able to separate us from 
the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our 
Lord.” What intervened between chapter 
seven and chapter eight ? Paul’s experience of 
the grace of God in Christ. That made him 
safe. Paul looks his old foes in the face and 
triumphs over them. God prepared a table 
before him in the presence of his enemies. 

And so He will do for us if we commit our¬ 
selves to His keeping. We are in the midst of 
foes, but they shall not be able to hurt us. 
They can only gnash their teeth in helpless and 
impotent rage. “ Tho’ the wolves may ravin, 
none can do us harm.” Over our own passions 

[ 127 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


and the world’s temptations and the devil’s in¬ 
citements we can, through the strength which 
God supplies, come off victorious. Be not, 
therefore, affrighted of your adversaries. God 
will keep you in security and peace. “ Thou 
preparest a table before me in the presence of 
mine enemies.” 

The “ prepared table ” I have been suggest¬ 
ing stands for the strength which God supplies 
to all who trust Him, and which enables them 
to put the world, the flesh and the devil beneath 
their feet. But what about those who have 
been beaten down by their own lusts and pas¬ 
sions, who have been beguiled by the world and 
taken captive by the devil at his will? I have 
been saying there is strength to be had enough 
to enable us to master and conquer temptation, 
but what about those who have fallen into sin ? 
There is a full table for the tempted saint, is 
there a table provided for the guilty sinner? 
Yes, there is. Indeed, there would not be much 
hope for any one of us if there weren’t. For 
we have all sinned and come short of the glory 
of God. We are all lost and guilty and undone. 

[ 128 ] 




THE PULL TABLE 


But for us, too, God has provided a table. He 
provided one for David. For David fell low 
and sinned shamefully. But God provided a 
table for him—a table of mercy and free for¬ 
giveness. And He provides the same table for 
fallen and sinful men still. “ Come and let us 
return unto the Lord and He will have mercy 
upon us, and to our God, for He will abun¬ 
dantly pardon.” 

This table was not provided without cost. 
God gave His Son, His only Son, in order to 
provide this table of mercy and free forgive¬ 
ness. He gave Him to pain and shame and 
death. But the result is a table is provided for 
sinful men. Mercy and pardon and peace are 
now proffered to all. Thou providest a table. 
No one else could have provided this table. 
We could never have earned forgiveness. We 
could never have merited mercy. Only God, 
by the sacrifice of His Son, could provide this 
table. 

“ There was none other good enough, 

To pay the price of sin, 

He only could unlock the gate 
Of heaven and let us in.” 

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THE KING OF LOVE 


But the table is now provided. The Lord’s 
body has been broken and His blood has been 
shed, and now mercy and pardon are provided 
for us all. “ Thou preparest a table before me 
in the presence of mine enemies.” And the 
guilty soul has its enemies. Law is its enemy, 
death is its enemy, the judgment is its enemy. 
But in face of God’s provided mercy, law and 
death and judgment are all powerless to hurt. 
Law has no claim. “ There is now no con¬ 
demnation to them that are in Christ Jesus,” 
Death has no terror. 

“ There is no death for me to fear, 

Since Christ my Lord hath died.” 

And judgment has no fear. “ We have bold¬ 
ness in the day of judgment.” Mercy 
triumphs over judgment. The love of God 
comes between a man and his sins. Here is 
the Gospel for every sin-burdened soul. God 
has mercy for every guilty soul. Christ has 
made propitiation for the sins of the world. 
And once we have partaken of that mercy, law 

[ 130 ] 




THE FULL TABLE 


and death and judgment cease to terrify and 
appal. “ Thou preparest a table before me, in 
the presence of mine enemies.” 

“ Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup 
runneth over.” 

If the prepared table stands for God’s pro¬ 
vision for our need, the fragrant oil and the 
mantling and overflowing cup stands for the 
joyfulness of the Christian life. There can be 
no joy as long as life is dubious, checkered, 
broken. There can be no joy so long as we 
are haunted by fears. There can be no real 
happiness so long as we are burdened by sin. 
But when once life becomes strong and victo¬ 
rious, once our sins have been taken away and 
our fears removed joy and song come stealing 
in. Life becomes a high festival. Joy al¬ 
ways comes in the train of deliverance. 
“ Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup 
runneth over.” There is a certain magnifi¬ 
cence about God’s providing! There is 
nothing skimpy or niggardly about it. He 
never confines Himself to bare necessaries, 


[ 131 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


When He made a world, He didn’t make it on 
utilitarian principles. He made it gay with 
flowers, glorious with the crimsons of sunsets 
and dawns, musical with the whispers of the 
winds and the caroling of the birds. He made 
it full of splendour and of joy, beauty and 
light. “ His paths,” says the Psalmist, “ drop 
fatness.” There is a certain lavishness, a cer¬ 
tain extravagance, a certain overflow in the 
goodness of God. And so it is in the highest 
realm. When the youngest son came back it 
was bare sustenance he asked for—life on any 
terms. But his father gave him a ring for his 
hands and shoes for his feet; he put on him 
the best robe, and there was music and dancing. 
He gave him more than sustenance; he gave 
him the joy of the son’s place. And God does 
more than prepare a table. He does more than 
provide support and security. He gives us 
gladness. He does more than pardon, He gives 
us joy. 


[ 132 ] 




VI 

GOODNESS AND MERCY 


The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want 
He makes me down to lie 

In pastures green, He leadeth me 
The quiet waters by. 

My soul he doth restore again; 

And me to walk doth make 

Within the paths of righteousness, 

Ev’n for His own name’s sake. 

Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale, 
Yet will I fear none ill; 

For Thou art with me, and Thy rod 
And staff me comfort still. 

My table Thou has furnish’d 
In presence of my foes; 

My head Thou dost with oil anoint, 

And my cup overflows. 

Goodness and mercy all my life 
Shall surely follow me; 

And in God’s house for evermore 
My dwelling-place shall be. 

—Scottish Psalter 1650. 


VI 


GOODNESS AND MERCY 

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all 
the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of 
the Lord forever 

I have failed altogether in my exposition of 
this Psalm if I have not made you feel that 
from the first sentence to the last it is just 
a happy, sunny song of confidence and trust. I 
am not at all sure that this little Psalm does not 
represent the high water mark of faith so far 
as the Old Testament is concerned. “ Per¬ 
haps,” says Bishop Perowne in his commentary, 
“ there is no Psalm in which the absence of all 
doubt, misgiving, fear and anxiety is so re¬ 
markable.” From one point of view, this Book 
of Psalms, this great book of devotion, may be 
described as the expression of the faith of 
elect and believing souls. But in it we see faith 
in all sorts of moods, in all sorts of attitudes, in 
all sorts of conditions and circumstances. In 

[ 135 ] 




THE KING OP LOVE 


some Psalms we see faith fighting for its life; 
faith struggling with unfaith, faith almost 
overwhelmed and beaten to the ground, faith 
“ scarcely saved ”; but in this Psalm we see 
faith victorious, faith serene and untroubled. 
Some Psalms are cries from the depths; some 
are broken by sobs and moans; but this Psalm 
is like a lark’s song on a spring morning. The 
Psalmist sings all the way through. He sings 
not only when he is being led into green pas¬ 
tures and by still waters, and when he is being 
guided along paths of righteousness, but he 
sings also when he passes through valleys of 
deep gloom. Nothing can disturb his faith; 
nothing can quench his joy. He is sure of the 
care and love of God, and so he rejoices always. 
He sings under all skies and in all circum¬ 
stances. But the song reaches its climax, its 
glorious fortissimo, in this verse with which 
the Psalm closes. “ Surely, goodness and 
mercy shall follow me all the days of my life 
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord 
forever.” 


[ 136 ] 





GOODNESS AND MERCY 


You may search literature through and you 
will not discover a more jubilant, triumphant, 
exultant expression of happy confidence than 
that. “ Surely! ” That is a fine note to strike 
at the commencement. He starts off with a 
“ loud, triumphant chord.” This is no guess 
or “ perhaps ”—this great optimism of this 
verse. It is a solid certainty verified by the 
Psalmist’s own experience. There is some¬ 
thing peculiarly comforting in the very word— 
especially to such an age as ours. For the 
characteristic of our age is that we are not very 
sure about anything. Our age, Dr. van Dyke 
has said, is an age of doubt whose fitting crest 
would be an interrogation mark and its ap¬ 
propriate motto “ Query.” We question of life 
and death and sin. We faintly trust. We 
dimly see. “ Faith and unfaith can ne’er be 
equal powers,” says Tennyson. Well, perhaps 
not. But there may be little between them on 
the balance. And to a vague, wavering, 
dubious age like ours there is something ex- 
hilirating and bracing about speech that begins 

[ 137 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


like this. “ Surely ”—especially when the 
“ surely ” introduces so glorious an affirmation 
as this. But though the word “ surely ” strikes 
so brave a note I am not at all certain that the 
word David used does not really strike a note 
braver still. This is the grammatical comment 
Dr. Davidson makes upon the word: “ The 
opening word is sometimes affirmative, as in the 
Revised Version text ‘ surely ’; it is sometimes 
restrictive, as in the Revised Version margin 
‘ only.’ Now oftentimes the revisers retained 
a word in the text because it had been made 
sacred by long usage, while they relegated the 
more accurate translation to the margin. They 
seem to have done so here. ‘ Only 5 is the bet¬ 
ter translation of the word David used. And 
while ‘ surely ’ is a grand opening to this verse, 
* only ’ is grander still. ‘ Only ’ goodness and 
mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” 

What a height this is to which the Psalm¬ 
ist’s faith has risen! In the previous verse he 
has spoken of “ the presence ” of his enemies. 
All through the first four verses in which he 

[ 138 ] 




GOODNESS AND MERCY 


speaks of God as a shepherd there rises the 
thought of the wild beasts—the wolf and the 
lion—ready to snatch at the sheep. But by this 
verse, the snarl of the wolf has died away, and 
all his enemies have disappeared. Trouble, 
pain, loss, temptation, sin—they have almost 
ceased to exist for him. He is conscious only 
of the love and care of God. They fill his 
world for him. “ Surely goodness and mercy 
shall follow me all the days of my life.” You 
are most of you acquainted with Thompson’s 
Hound of Heaven. The Hound of Heaven in 
that poem is just the seeking and redeeming 
love of God that pursues the sinner all down 
the years and through all the lands of sin and 
shame into which he may wander, intent upon 
rescuing and saving him. The sinner seeks to 
escape, but his one hope is that the Hound of 
Heaven pursues him without weariness—that 
love of God which will not let him go. David 
here too sings of the Hound of Heaven. Only 
he does not seek to escape it. He rejoices in 
that unwearied love. He exults in the thought 

[ 139 ] 




THE KING OE LOVE 


that every day and all the day he is pursued, 
shadowed, attended by God’s care and love. 
“ Only goodness and mercy shall follow me 
all the days of my life.” 

On what does the Psalmist base this mighty 
but daring optimism of his? In a word, on 
the character of God as he himself has experi¬ 
enced it, on the character of God as shepherd 
and host, as shepherd guiding him along right 
ways and protecting him against all foes, and 
as host providing royally and lavishly for all 
his needs. David had found God to be all that 
to him in the course of his career, and basing 
himself on what he himself had known of the 
love of God, he knows that only goodness and 
mercy can follow him. I said in my study of 
the first verse of this Psalm that this was not a 
song of David’s youth, but of David’s age. It 
was not composed when he was a lad watching 
his father’s sheep in the fields of Bethlehem; it 
was composed when he was a man, an old man, 
after passing through all those vicissitudes and 
all those tremendous personal experiences of 

[ 140 ] 




GOODNESS AND MERCY 


which the Bible pages tell the story. And the 
assurance of the text is all the more convincing 
on that account. This is not the gay and irre¬ 
sponsible optimism of youth. Youth is apt to 
paint everything in rose colour. Youth, un¬ 
touched by serious trouble, is ready enough to 
say “ all’s well with the world.” But this is 
not the effervescence of youth. It is the sober 
judgment of age. David had had his share of 
trial and trouble—deep, poignant, tragic. But 
through all the changes of his career he had 
found God to be both shepherd and host—he 
had found God protected him and provided for 
him. He had found God’s kindness and love 
never failed. And it is on the character of God 
as he had discovered it in his own experience 
that he bases himself when he gives utterance to 
this mighty optimism. “ Surely goodness and 
mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” 

We know more about the character of God 
than David did. He only knew God as re¬ 
vealed in his own experience; we know God as 
revealed in Jesus Christ, and especially in 

[ 141 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


Christ’s cross. We know love is God’s nature 
—love so deep and strong that it made the last 
and utmost sacrifice. Basing ourselves on the 
character of God as revealed in Christ, we can 
with even more assurance than the Psalmist 
dare to hold this splendid faith. With our God 
and Father at the helm we can be sure that only 
goodness and mercy will follow us all the days 
of our life; or, as the Christian Apostle puts 
it in slightly varying phrase, that all things 
must work together for good to them that 
love God. 


the rear guard 

Now, coming to look at the words more 
closely, I want you to notice that there is in the 
soaring assurance of this sentence an advance 
in thought over all that has gone before. All 
through the little Psalm breathes confidence and 
trust. In the first verse David declares that 
because the Lord is his Shepherd, “ he shall not 
want.” For the same reason he declares in the 
fourth verse that he “ will fear no evil.” In 

[ 142 ] 





GOODNESS AND MERCY 


those two verses, as Dr. Maclaren says, the 
Psalmist’s trust simply refused to yield to fear 
while keenly conscious of evil which might 
warrant it; but here he has risen higher and 
the alchemy of his happy faith and experience 
has converted evil into something fairer. The 
two former assurances, wonderful though they 
are, are negative. “ I shall not want. ... I 
will fear no evil.” This is positive. “ Only 
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the 
days of my life.” David’s assurance here is 
not simply that his life will be protected from 
harm, but that it will be enriched and blessed 
by the love and care of God. 

And perhaps the reason for this advance in 
thought, this climax of faith, is this: that 
David became more conscious of his protectors 
than of his foes. I think his foes loom most 
largely before his vision in the previous verses, 
but his protectors fill the field here. “ Only 
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the 
days of my life.” He sees goodness and mercy 
like two bright-faced angels walking behind 

[ 143 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


him as his rear guard. “ Goodness ” is the 
bounty that provides for need; “ mercy ” is the 
love that bestows more than is deserved. And 
as the Psalmist views his life he sees it at¬ 
tended by goodness and mercy as two guardian 
angels. And in view of these two mighty pro¬ 
tectors, his foes cease to count; they vanish 
from his field of vision. “ Only goodness and 
mercy shall follow me.” I mentioned in the 
last chapter that amongst the enemies we have 
to face there are certain spiritual foes—“ the 
principalities and powers, the world rulers of 
this darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness 
in the heavenly places,” of whom St. Paul 
speaks. They make a terrible list of foes. But 
we need not cower in face of them. For if we 
have spiritual foes we have also spiritual help¬ 
ers and defenders. “ The angel of the Ford 
encampeth round about them that fear Him, 
and delivereth them.” And for our own cour¬ 
age and good hope we need to remember these 
unseen helpers. “ Open his eyes, Lord, that he 
may see,” was Elisha’s prayer for his servant 

[ 144 ] 




GOODNESS AND MERCY 


who had fallen into a panic when he saw 
Dothan invested by Syrians, and who had 
jumped to the conclusion that into their hands 
both he and his master were bound to fall. And 
God heard the prayer and opened the servant’s 
eyes and he saw the mountain was full of 
horses and chariots of fire “ round about 
Elisha.” The helpers were more mighty and 
more numerous than the foes. And that was 
what brought to David the glorious and victo¬ 
rious certitude that beats through this closing 
verse—he saw goodness and mercy following 
him. “ Only goodness and mercy,” for at sight 
of these mighty helpers all his enemies seemed 
to have slunk away. 

“ Only goodness and mercy shall follow me.” 
I wonder whether there is significance in that 
word " follow ” t I fancy somehow that 
David was more afraid of what lay behind him 
than of what lay in front of him. What lay in 
front of him? The valley of the shadow of 
death. But he feared no evil there; he was 
sure God’s rod and staff would be with him for 

[ 145 ] 





THE KING OF LOVE 


his comfort. What lay behind? A black record 
of sin and shame. I need not recall it. The 
ugly story is familiar enough. Murder and 
adultery were both in David’s personal record. 
And for the tragedies that took place in the 
circle of his family David is not to be wholly 
absolved from blame. That past contained bit¬ 
ter memories for David. And what he was 
most afraid of was the remorse and condemna¬ 
tion that past entailed and perhaps also a recru¬ 
descence of those evil passions and habits which 
the practice of that past had fostered. David 
was afraid of his past. He feared the pains 
and penalties of his own sin. But when he 
looked back it was not the pursuing shapes of 
his own follies and sins he saw; he saw the 
angels of goodness and mercy attending his 
steps. Between him and his pursuing sins 
came God in all His love and grace. “ Surely 
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days 
of my life.” And there is rich and rare com¬ 
fort in this, not only for David, but also for 
us. Our most deadly danger comes from be- 

[ 146 ] 




GOODNESS AND MERCY 


hind. Rear guard attacks in war are the most 
deadly of all attacks. How destructive and 
terrible they may be we may learn from the 
tragic story of Napoleon’s retreat from Mos¬ 
cow. The finest army in the world was there 
practically destroyed by the ceaseless attacks of 
a restless and merciless foe upon the flank and 
rear of a retreating host. And it is from the 
rear—from our own past—that our most 
deadly peril arises. For our past is not past in 
the sense that it is dead and buried. The dead 
past never buries its dead. The past affects 
the present. Yesterday lives on in today. 
“ Their works do follow them ” is true not only 
of the saints, but of the sinners, too. What 
are the things that pursue us from the past and 
menace our very life? I am going to mention 
just two, though there are many others. 

(1) There are the evil habits which the past 
has formed. What we are today is the result 
of all our yesterdays. In those yesterdays, per¬ 
haps, we lightly and unthinkingly formed some 
foolish and sinful habit. We may have tried 

[ 147 ] 




THE KING OF LOVE 


to break it, perhaps in a measure we may have 
succeeded in breaking it. But we know the 
desire is still there. That is a terrible verse 
which says “ His bones are full of the sins of 
his youth.” But terrible though it is, it is 
terribly and tragically true. Many a man finds 
his own past the biggest obstacle in the way 
of living a clean and honourable life today. 
The reformed drunkard finds his most terrible 
foe is the drink thirst he himself has created. 
The converted profligate finds his most fearful 
struggles arise from an imagination polluted in 
its very grain by his own habitual filthiness of 
previous years. We, all of us, know something 
about this. The power of a sinful habit abides 
even after we may have broken with it. You 
remember that couplet in Tennyson’s Idylls in 
which he makes one of his knights resolve to 
put away the evil uses of his life, but “ they 
from all his life arise and say, Thou hast made 
us lords, and canst not put us down.” And 
the fear is never quite absent lest these evil 
habits of ours, which we honestly want to put 

[ 148 ] 




GOODNESS AND MERCY 


away, should reassert their power and make us 
bite the dust. But the gospel a little verse like 
this preaches is that “ Goodness and mercy 
follow us.” Between us and these evil habits 
of our past comes the goodness of God, and the 
goodness of God, as I said a moment ago, sig¬ 
nifies the provision God makes over against our 
need. God’s grace and enabling power defend 
us against the presence of our own evil past. 
He breaks the power of cancelled sin. He 
brings us off more than conquerors. God comes 
between us and our pursuing foes and rescues 
us from their attack. “ Goodness and mercy 
follow us.” 

(2) And there are not only the evil habits 
which the past has formed, but there are the 
sins, black and shameful, of which the past 
contains the story. And those sins—the very 
memory of them—rise up in judgment to con¬ 
demn us. We know quite well that for our 
sins God is justly displeased—that on account 
of these we deserve nothing but punishment 
and pain. They dog our steps—these unfor- 

[ 149 ] 




THE KING OP LOVE 


gotten sins of ours, and they clamour for our 
blood. But between us and those sins of ours 
that cry out against us and condemn us comes 
God. I look back and I can see not my sins. I 
see “ goodness and mercy ” following. “ Good¬ 
ness and mercy!” Between us and law and 
judgment and death, keeping them at bay, re¬ 
ducing them to impotence, banishing them 
indeed from sight, comes mercy. “ As far as 
the East is from the West so far has God re¬ 
moved our transgressions from us.” There is 
one word written large over the face of the 
Bible and that is sin! There is another word 
written in larger letters still and that is forgive¬ 
ness. “ Where sin abounds, grace doth much 
more abound.” 

We are safe against all pursuing foes— 
against the crippling power and the condem¬ 
nation of our own past—because between us 
and them God comes. You remember that 
great verse in Isaiah in which the prophet says, 
“The Lord will go before you; the God of 
Israel will be your rearward.” God in front 

[ 150 ] 




GOODNESS AND MERCY 


and God behind. The same thought is in this 
Psalm, too. In verse three God is in front— 
“ He guideth me in the paths of righteousness 
for His name’s sake.” In this verse six God is 
behind. “ Surely goodness and mercy follow 
me.” The Psalmist’s life is encompassed by 
God. What wonder the joy was in his heart 
and the song upon his lips? For what harm 
could befall a life thus encompassed? The 
Psalmist was safe amid the unknown perils of 
the way because God was leading him along 
paths of righteousness; he was equally safe 
against all the foes that rose up out of his own 
past because “ goodness and mercy followed 
him.” “ Surely goodness and mercy shall fol¬ 
low me all the days of my life/' “ All the 
days.” The care of God never ceases! The 
vigilance of God never relaxes. His love never 
changes. Goodness and mercy shall follow us 
all our days; goodness to strengthen and mercy 
to forgive. The promise has been taken up and 
repeated by our Lord Himself. For Jesus is 
but the goodness and mercy of the Lord in- 

[ 151 ] 




THE KING OE LOVE 


carnate. And that is what the Incarnate Good¬ 
ness and Mercy says: “ Lo, I am with you all 
the days even to the end of the world.” The 
days may differ from each other. Some may 
be sunny and others may be overcast; some 
may be stormy and others may be calm; but 
whatever the nature of the day Christ will be 
with us caring for us, and that means that 
“ only goodness and mercy shall follow us all 
the days of our life.” 

THE HOUSE OE THE LORD 

And now I turn for a moment to speak about 
the second clause of the verse. “ And I shall 
dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” The 
triumphant assurance of this second sentence 
is the consequence of the great affirmation of 
the first. I do not know that David would 
have been so sure about “ dwelling in the house 
of the Lord for ever if he had not been sure 
that “ goodness and mercy ” were following 
him. If goodness and mercy had not been 
following him David’s sins and passions might 

[ 152 ] 





GOODNESS AND MERCY 


have got the better of him; he might have 
wandered off into the far country and made 
his bed in hell. But seeing that “ goodness and 
mercy ” were following him, knowing that 
God’s wisdom and love were attending to his 
guidance and protection, he was certain that he 
should dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. 
His confidence was based, not on his own 
strength at all, but on God’s forgiving love and 
keeping care. 

The commentators are not agreed as to what 
exactly David means by “ dwelling in the house 
of the Lord for ever.” When we read this lit¬ 
tle sentence we naturally and instinctively think 
of heaven and Perowne is loath to give up the 
idea that David may have had some anticipa¬ 
tion of an everlasting sanctuary above. But 
we must beware of reading into David’s words 
beliefs that belonged to a much later time. 
There is no direct allusion to a future life in 
the words “ for ever,” says Davidson, though 
he adds that neither is there any exclusion of 
the thought. Perhaps we had better say that 

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THE KING OE LOVE 


when David talks about “ dwelling in God’s 
house for ever ” he is thinking of uninter¬ 
rupted fellowship and communion with God. 
“ The house of the Lord ” was the tabernacle, 
and later the temple. And it was the aspiration 
of many a pious Psalmist to abide there. But 
he wanted to abide there in order that the com¬ 
munion might be uninterrupted. That uninter¬ 
rupted communion was the essential thing. 
And that was what David wanted, and that is 
what he was quite sure he should enjoy. “ I 
shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” 
Dr. Maclaren says that “ dwelling in the house 
of the Lord ” in this sense was regarded as 
possible even while hands are engaged in ordi¬ 
nary duties and cares. David, even when 
occupied with the great affairs of kingship, 
might yet dwell in the Lord’s house. The com¬ 
munion might continue unbroken. And per¬ 
haps he had a moment of high vision when the 
conviction was borne in upon his soul that such 
communion never could be broken. David, like 
the rest of the Jews, had no clear faith in a 

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GOODNESS AND MERCY 


hereafter, but perhaps he felt that this blessed 
fellowship simply could not end; that it was 
bound to go on somewhere. That is one of the 
mighty and most irrefragable arguments for 
immortality. God will never surrender His 
friends. God does not call men into friendship 
with Himself to let that friendship perish in a 
few years. God is faithful—faithful to His 
friends—and that friendship is bound to con¬ 
tinue some other where. And perhaps David, 
in a moment of insight, had it flashed in upon 
him that not even death could interrupt his fel¬ 
lowship with God. He would for ever remain 
in some “ house of the Lord.” It was a faith 
like Whittier’s: 

“ I know not where His islands lift, 

Their fronded palms in air. 

I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond His love and care.” 

“ I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for 
ever.” 

But living, as we do, in the enjoyment of the 

[ 155 ] 




THE KING OP LOVE 


light of Christ we can use these words with a 
fulness of meaning impossible to David. “ We 
can dwell in the house of the Lord ” all the 
days we sojourn on this earth. Jesus, when 
about his carpenter’s work, was still in the 
Father’s house and about His Father’s business. 
And we, too, attended as we are by goodness 
and mercy, cared for as we are by the Father’s 
love, may live in heaven even while our busi¬ 
ness is on earth; we may hold high and blessed 
fellowship with God even while pursuing our 
ordinary avocations ; we may work in shop or 
office and yet sit down in the heavenly places 
with Christ Jesus. And the high and holy fel¬ 
lowship thus established shall never be broken. 
We shall dwell in the house of the Lord “ for 
ever.” For in the Father’s house there are 
many mansions. We live in an outlying man¬ 
sion now. What happens at death is that we 
are called into another mansion “ fairer than 
this we leave and lovelier,” where the fellow¬ 
ship becomes closer and more intimate still. 
When we depart it is to be with Christ, which 

[ 156 ] 





GOODNESS AND MERCY 


is far better. Those who have fallen asleep in 
Christ have not perished, but being absent from 
the body are at home with the Lord. The Lord 
spreads a table before us here, in the presence 
of our enemies. And He has a supper waiting 
for us up yonder—with no glimpse of a foe to 
mar our peace—the marriage supper of the 
Lamb, and from that supper—and those halls 
all jubilant with song, we shall no more go 
out. We shall “ dwell in the house of the Lord 
for ever.” 

On that note, that happy and exultant note, 
this little Psalm ends. Those who put them¬ 
selves in the care and keeping of God shall not 
lack for guidance, protection, provision, as they 
journey through life. And when life draws to 
its close, God’s love does not fail. With God 
the best is always still to be. He keeps the 
good wine always to the last. For after see¬ 
ing us safely through the valley He brings us 
to the house of the Lord, where faith shall be¬ 
come sight and dream shall become deed, and 
hope shall become fruition, and where every 

[ 157 ] 





THE KING OK LOVE 


desire of the soul shall be satisfied. And in 
that house of the Lord we shall dwell for ever. 

“ So when my latest breath, 

Shall rend the veil in twain; 

By death I shall escape from death 
And life eternal gain: 

Knowing as I am known, 

How shall I love that word 
And oft repeat before the throne: 

‘ Forever with the Lord.’ ” 


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[ 158 ] 
















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